


This Merciless World

by Samuel412



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Dark, Existential Horror, F/F, Homophobia, Horror, Horrors of War, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Pharmercy, Post-Apocalypse, Psychological Torture, Religion, Surreal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:22:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 47,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26609743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samuel412/pseuds/Samuel412
Summary: Mercy awakens in the ruins of a dead world.
Comments: 33
Kudos: 31





	1. Waste

The sun beat down on the rotting corpse of the city. The long-dead buildings were mere skeletons of rebar and sun-bleached concrete. The streets were flooded with rubble of rusted, dessicated metal, crumbling stone, and broken glass being beaten back into sand by the relentless march of time. Had the city died a natural death, nature may have reclaimed the body, covering the ruin with green, consuming death to bring new life. Yet there was no plant life to be seen; not a weed pushing through cracked rock or a vine struggling to climb one of the broken walls. No insects buzzed, nor any birds called. The dead city was silent, as it had been for an abyss of time.

Once, every few months or years, the elements would take their toll on some decaying support structure in one of the ruined buildings. The silence would be broken, if only for a moment, by a landslide of concrete and metal, filling the air with dust, and spilling more rubble into the streets. Occasionally, these collapses would expose ancient remains- human skeletons that had been sheltered from the gnawing teeth of the elements by the ruins they were buried in. They would lay in the streets for a time, a meager reminder that life ever existed on this dead world, until the sun and the winds took their toll, and they joined into the fine layer of dust that covered the rubble around them. Until, that is, this process of collapse unearthed an artifact of human life that was different.

In the ancient remains of a military facility, for the past two centuries at least, flowing rainwater had been eroding a support pillar in the partially collapsed basement. It was not any momentous event that caused the pillar to finally give way. One second, the pillar could just barely support the concrete and metal above it, and the next, it could not. The collapse sent shockwaves of destruction through the building, as shifting weight caused numerous other collapses. Nearer the surface, one such collapse caused an entire section of flooring to tilt to one side. After remaining more or less level since the days when living people walked on it, the floor was now angled downwards towards the missing outer wall. Among the debris that slid out into the sunlight were a few desks, rotting ceiling tiles, a fine spray of broken glass shards, and half of a human femur.

The femur slid, more so than rolled, out into the sunlight, and was struck by light and heat for the first time in centuries. Friction eventually slowed it to a stop in the middle of a flat, slanted stone- what had, in fact, once been the wall of the building in had fallen from. There, the femur lay, being warmed by the sun. It was unclear for how long it sat there before the change began, but once it did, the transformation would rapidly gain speed until it was complete. A crack that ran along the ancient bone began to close, seemingly of its own volition. The broken end, once sharp where it had been snapped, then gradually dulled by time, now began to extend outward. The femur shifted back and forth slightly as its shape began to reform itself.

Within the now fully formed bone, the dry marrow began to soften. Liquid blood began to spread through it as living blood vessels regrew. Eventually, the blood vessels found their way to the bone’s surface, and began snaking back and forth along its length. Muscle began to grow from the blood vessels, then cartilage, and then other bones began to form in their places. The femur was no longer a dead formation of calcium, but a nearly complete human skeleton, with muscles growing between bones, tendons reconnecting themselves, and organs appearing within the rib cage.

The skin was very nearly the last thing to appear. It began spreading over the torso just as fingers regrew from the hands, and facial muscles pulled the lower jawbone into place. The pale white skin spread over the body, covering the torso and breasts, then spreading over the limbs and head, completing the face. Soft blond hair sprang from the scalp, and all at once, the transformation was complete. What was once a lifeless piece of debris had become the perfectly regenerated body of Angela Zeigler. The body lay perfectly still a few more moments, the limbs lain at its sides, the eyes closed. Then, with a sudden kick of energy, the heart began to beat, the eyes snapped open, and the lungs desperately cried out for air.

Mercy gasped, and drew in a painful breath. She spasmed on the rock, both writhing in pain and helplessly shielding her eyes from the burning sunlight. After a few seconds of shock from her sudden consciousness, Mercy let out a piercing scream, then nearly passed back out. Gradually, her breathing slowed, and her eyes began to adjust to the light.

She sat up, still dazed, still having no idea what was going on. She looked around. There was debris everywhere. She opened her mouth and tried to speak. She coughed, and her throat seemed to fight against the commands she gave it.

“He- h- Hello?” Mercy whispered, “Hello?”

Mercy looked down at her body. She realized that she was entirely nude. She stared at her hands, then squeezed her eyes shut. Where was she? How did she end up naked in the middle of a ruined street? She couldn’t remember anything. She stood up, almost losing her footing on the slanted stone. Now at full height, she looked around, making a half-hearted effort to conceal her body.

“Hello?” Mercy called out, “I’m- I’m alive, I-”

She stopped. Why had she said that? Of course she was alive. Why had her mind, still groggily waking up from whatever had happened to her, noted that as important? She tried again to remember what had happened. Only then did she realize that she wasn’t merely unable to remember the events leading to her waking up here- she truly couldn’t remember  _ anything _ . Her past was a haze, like a barely remembered dream. Nothing was distinct, not even-

“My name...” She whispered, “My name is...”

It hurt her head to think about it. She had a name, she knew that much. She could see it like an indistinct shape in her mind. She could feel the muscle memory of it on her tongue. But she couldn’t place it. She laughed, in spite of herself, at the ridiculousness of the situation. She sat back down on the stone surface she had woken up on.

“My name is...” She whispered, shaking her head, “I’m... amnesia.”

As soon as the word had escaped her lips, understanding seemed to hit her brain all at once.

“I’m suffering from temporary retrograde amnesia, most likely in response to a head injury or extended oxygen deprivation. It is disorienting and often frightening, but my memory will likely gradually return soon.”

She gasped. How had she known that? Parts of her mind were locked off to her, her memories and identity, but she could recall certain knowledge. She put her face in her hands. What was going on? Where was she? What was she supposed to do?

“I’ve likely been in an accident of some sort. I need medical attention. I should try and find someone who can help me.”

Again, some subconscious part of her mind had spoken up. She sighed. She stood, carefully made her way down the slope, and stepped onto the broken asphalt. She looked around, unsure of where to go. There was nothing but debris and ruin in one direction, and debris and ruin in the other. She made a decision arbitrarily, and set off down the street.

She wandered for some time, carefully avoiding broken glass and sharp stones with her bare feet. She could feel her mind trying to clear itself, but her past was still indistinct. She found that talking to herself would occasionally coax some knowledge out from her subconscious.

“I was a doctor,” She said, then shook her head, “I am a doctor.”

As soon as she said it, a rush of new information went through her. She was indeed a doctor- a scientist at the forefront of medicine. She’d been part of some organization, but left for... some reason.

“But I came back at the start of the second crisis,” She said.

Another twinge of pain in her head. What was the second crisis? She didn’t have a clue.

She had yet to find anyone in this city. It was clear from the debris that some form of cataclysm had happened. Buildings knocked down, rubble everywhere, but no people. No civilians seeking shelter, or armies fighting. It was clear that whatever happened here had happened a very long time ago, but why was the city left in ruin? Where was everybody?

“I would have been... flying around healing people,” She said, “My suit, I would use it to fly to people in danger so I could heal them. And the suit would keep me healthy too.”

That one was big. She felt more memories flooding back. She had invented the Varia suit. She’d use it for disaster response- saving lives in dangerous environments. But the suit wasn’t enough. She had improved on it at the start of the Second Omnic Crisis. There was another tidbit of memory. The Omnic Crisis. She couldn’t remember what an “Omnic” was; only that they weren’t human. They’d started a war with humans, for some reason, and the only ones who could stop them were-

“Overwatch.”

She’d been so caught up in this disorienting process of recall that she’d stopped looking where she was walking. Pain suddenly ripped through her body, coming from her left foot. She gasped out in agony, and nearly fell over. Instinctually, she understood that falling would make the injury she’d just suffered much worse. Slowly, she looked down. She had errantly stepped on a large shard of broken glass. Her foot had not gotten all the way to the ground- it was impaled, with several centimeters of the shard extending downwards from her sole as well as pushing out the top of her foot. She whimpered.

There was an ancient metal framework of what might have once been a car to her left side. She reached out and took hold of it, steadying herself. Taking a short, panicked breaths, she began to lift her foot. She managed only the tiniest pull before she was stopped by another spasm of pain. Her vision blurred; tears were forming in her eyes. She took a few deep breaths, slowly exhaled, then yanked her foot upwards.

She fell back against the metal ruin. She screamed in pain. She could feel warm blood pouring from the bottom of her foot, and spilling from the top. She could feel it running off her toes. She grabbed hold of the injured foot, sobbing from the pain.

“Severe laceration- injury to highly sensitive area,” She breathed, “Need specialized treatment. A podiatrist. Need to find someone- no, need to stop the bleeding...”

A strange sensation began to emerge from the pain. Like an intense itching. As Mercy gripped her wounded extremity, the blood abruptly stopped running from the wound. In shock, Mercy watched as the wound began to pull itself shut. An almost burning warmth came from the wound as the skin closed itself up. All at once, the pain was gone. Save for the blood in a puddle on the ground, and smeared on the shard of glass, there was no evidence she’s been injured at all. Mercy flexed her toes and found that her foot was in perfect condition.

“What...?”

Mercy slid down the wreck until she was seated on the ground. She had worked with Overwatch during the Omnic Crisis. She had left afterwards- she disagreed with them on something. But she rejoined out of necessity at the start of the Second Omnic Crisis. When the machines tried again to wipe out humanity. Her Varia suit’s ability to repair her body was limited- too slow. So she had improved it. Not by adding something to the suit but adding something to herself.

“Mercy,” She said, “my name is Mercy.”


	2. Tower

Mercy was huddled in the corner of what may have once been a deli or shop. Any evidence of either was long since rotted away, leaving what was little more than a cave nestled into the ruins. She’d walked for hours, and seen no one. There wasn’t any sign that any human beings or even Omnics still lived in this desiccated wreck of a city. Perhaps even more concerning was that there wasn’t any life at all. No plants, no insects. What could the Omnics have done to wipe out biological life so thoroughly? 

Mercy held a jagged piece of metal in one hand. She stared at the sharp edge for a moment, then opened her other hand. She winced as she sliced a shallow cut along her palm. The injury remained for a moment, then closed itself before her eyes. She nodded. Briefly before... whatever had happened to her, she had injected herself with experimental biotic nanomachines. She’d developed them to replace the self-healing function of her Varia suit. The Second Omnic Crisis had been so grueling, so violent, her suit had multiple times run out of the biotic energy it used to heal her. These nanomachines would be powered by her body heat- able to self-replicate as needed and repair any damage to the host’s body. 

Mercy was starting to realize, from the age of the decay, that a significant amount of time had passed. Decades, perhaps. How she came to be here was a complete mystery. Had she been in some comatose state, only to be revived by the nanomachines? Why would it have taken so long? How did her body survive that long without sustenance? Had she been technically dead? The thought was chilling. Mercy had the ability, with all of her gear, to “resurrect” a person, very briefly after their death. But not from brain death. 

“I was alive,” Mercy said to herself, “I don’t know how, but I’ve been alive this whole time. I must have been.” 

She was beginning to recall more details of her past. The disorientation must have been the result of her long period of unconsciousness. The second Omnic Crisis had been an order of magnitude more destructive than the first. Morrison had died trying to stop Talon from triggering the second crisis, but he failed. The virus Talon unleashed, turning every Omnic on the planet into a killing machine, worked too well. It was supposed to make humanity stronger through warfare- the fever dream of a social Darwinist psychopath. Within weeks, Talon had been wiped out by the machines they’d frenzied. Overwatch made a desperate bid to reunite and save mankind. Mercy had been in one of the last few surviving cities when it was overrun. That was the last thing she could remember. 

“Maybe I... put myself in cryostasis,” She mused, “Wandered out of the tube in a daze, passed out outside?” 

That was plausible, but it didn’t sit with her right. She’d have put someone else in the pod before herself, if she thought that would save them. Maybe somebody else had put her in. 

“Fareeha would have put me in,” Mercy said. She still couldn’t remember who Fareeha was, but the name carried importance, and the statement rang true. It still didn’t explain why Mercy woke up nude- a problem she had yet to deal with. 

Mercy shook her head, and stood. She had to keep looking for other survivors. At this point, it was clear that civilization had collapsed to some degree, but there must be humans out there somewhere. Without any meaningful landmarks, the only option that made sense was getting higher. From the top of one of the still standing skyscrapers, she’d be able to see for kilometers in every direction. A settlement, a plume of smoke from a fire, some evidence of life; she would surely see something. 

Mercy walked out of her brief shelter and emerged again into the sun. There was a building a ways down the street in the direction she came. It looked to be about fifty storeys. That would do. She began walking. 

She took a little less care now, walking across the broken stone and rough ground. Damage that would typically be accumulating on her feet was now being repaired with every step. Mercy imagined that the regenerative ability she’d given herself would likely come in handy while trying to survive the world she’d found herself in. How bad of an injury would she be able to survive? 

She reached the towering spire of decaying stone and metal and spent a moment taking it in. It stood tall over the ruins around it, obviously built to last. The building next to it was nothing but a pile of broken stone, with support beams thrusting out of the pile, and menacing spikes of rebar, some over 4 meters long. Mercy walked into the skyscraper, looking for the staircases. 

Ascending the tower was a small challenge at times. Most flights of stairs were entirely intact, shielded from the elements by the walls around them, but some had collapsed, leaving either massive gaps that Mercy had no hope of jumping across, or piles of rubble that blocked off the way forward almost completely. While pulling herself up over the broken rock, several times the rubble shifted underfoot, sending Mercy desperately scrambling for safety as small collapses sent the sound of shattering stone echoing through the building. 

On the fifth floor of the building, for the past sixty years, rainwater had been pooling, then flowing past the last surviving support pillar in the northwest corner of that floor. The water had taken its toll over time, but the pillar had thus far held strong, though the weakened stone was beginning to show cracks. As Mercy passed the fifth floor, a misplaced footfall sent a chunk of concrete crashing down the staircase. The impact did little visible damage, but sent a shockwave of vibration through the ancient building, and, so subtly as to be nearly imperceptible to the naked eye, one of the cracks on the aging support pillar grew a few millimeters longer. 

Mercy emerged finally onto the roof of the skyscraper. The climb had taken her a significant amount of time, and she relished the chance to sit and relax a moment, her back against the rusting hulk of what had once been an air conditioning unit. She was out of breath, and her legs were sore, but she was beginning to notice something odd. She wasn’t truly tired, or, for that matter, hungry. Despite apparently waking from a coma, and walking for hours- even ascending a building- she felt just as full of energy as when she’d woken. Were the nanomachines constantly restoring her stamina? That couldn’t last forever, surely. The sun was just starting to dip towards the horizon. She’d have to find somewhere to sleep soon, and tomorrow, find food. 

On the fifth floor, the crack in the pillar grew by another millimeter. This time, the crack expelled a small amount of dust, the pulverized remnants of the rock that had once supported the building above it. The growing crack was not the only one of its kind; there were other cracks crisscrossing along the pillar’s surface. The path that the crack was taking as it grew was bringing it closer to intersecting with another. When the two cracks met, a massive chunk of the pillar would quite abruptly have nothing holding it to the stone around it. 

Mercy walked to the edge of the roof. The roof was bordered by a waist-high wall, still intact for the most part. When Mery reached it, she placed a hand on the aging, cracked bricks. A small piece of stone was dislodged by her touch, and plummeted silently to the street below. Mercy felt a wave of vertigo, but didn’t recoil, only now recalling that she had no fear of heights. Looking out at the vast landscape of ruin, it was immediately clear that the part of the city she had woken up in was not unique for its lack of life. There was no visible evidence of any surviving civilization; no lights, no smoke, no movement. There were no birds in the sky, no patches of green in the sea of brown, grey, and bone white. 

Where could she go? In all the world, where did humanity remain? If the world was in such a state of disrepair; such a state of lifeless, antiseptic ruin, she might wander for years and never find another living soul. How far away was the nearest human being? A hundred kilometers? A thousand? Was she alone in whatever country this was? Whatever continent? 

“Am I the last human?” She whispered. 

As if in answer, a low rumble spread through the building beneath her feet. Mercy looked down as the roof began to tremble. She heard a series of crashes coming closer, a cascade of collapses climbing up the building to her. Before Mercy could process what she should do, the roof she stood on dropped from beneath her feet by almost a meter. It stopped at a slant, tilted towards the edge just in front of her. As Mercy dropped down to the still rumbling surface, the waist high barrier crumbled and fell away, leaving only a jagged row of stone teeth as a barrier between Mercy and the open air. Mercy threw out her arms to steady her landing, but her feet slipped out from under her, her legs gave way, and she fell to her side against the roof. Without any time to grab hold of anything to secure herself, she slid down the incline and was flung over the edge. 

Mercy let out a primal scream of terror. The world around her had become a tumultuous whirlwind as she plummeted. The sky and ground spun about her; the floors of the skyscraper rushed past at ever increasing speed. All coherent thought was stripped from her mind by the terror of knowing there was nothing to be done. Striking the ground would be instantly lethal from even half the height she’d fallen. She had nothing to do but fall, scream and die. The last thought her mind managed to produce was of helpless anger that her inexplicable survival would be cut short by such a pointless death. 

Her plummet suddenly stopped with a jarring impact. She didn’t feel it across her entire body, as expected of an impact with the ground. Instead, she felt the impact in her lower back. Her tumble suddenly stopped, her vision now facing upwards to the sky, and to the massive spike of rebar that had burst through her stomach. The chunks of stone and twisted jags of metal that stuck out along the length of the rebar halted her momentum as they tore through her flesh. Her body stopped halfway down the rebar spike, and the momentum caused her head to be thrust backwards, snapping her neck. Mercy managed to cough, spurting blood from her mouth, and then everything went black.


	3. Spike

Mercy’s eyes snapped open, and she took a sharp breath. Her entire body was immediately racked with pain, and she spasmed. Looking down at her own body, she saw the rebar spike impaling her. It was drenched in her blood, which was continuing to gush from her belly, and was running down the spike beneath her. 

“Oh fuck!” Mercy screamed, “Oh- oh, god. Oh shit.” 

She raised her arms and took hold of the spike. The movement caused her body to shift on the spike, sending a fresh explosion of pain through her. Mercy’s screams were cut off by more blood spurting from her mouth. Tears streamed from her eyes, and she fell limp, her head, arms and legs hanging down about the spike. Rolling her eyes about, too paralyzed by pain to even turn her head, she looked around. 

The spike she was impaled on stood at least 5 meters tall. She’d slid 3 meters down its length. There was nothing whatsoever in reach of her. 

“Help me,” She whimpered, “Somebody pl- please. Help me.” 

Mercy took a deep breath. The pain filling her body made every movement agonizing. She raised her trembling hands to the spike again. She could feel grit and dirt and rust beneath her fingers and briefly imagined it spreading through her insides. She looked up the length of the spike. She would need to make it 3 meters. She exhaled, and pulled as hard as she could muster. Her body was dragged up the length of the spike a few centimeters, the metal fighting Mercy’s strength with its hold on her flesh. More blood gushed from her belly and the hole in her back. Another explosion of agony shot through her, and Mercy passed out, her body sliding down the blood-slicked metal to its original position. 

Mercy’s eyes opened again. She couldn’t tell how long she’d been out. She looked up at the spike again, and noticed the coating of blood starting to dry. Mercy whimpered, then gritted her teeth and reached up. She took hold of the spike with both hands, and the pain from her belly flared up in protest. Mercy wasn’t sure what position would be most effective for freeing herself. Her natural instinct was to curl into somewhat of a fetal position, but that just made her torso scream in pain all the more. She’d been more or less parallel to the ground when she’d hit the spike, so logic held that holding that position would help her slide upwards easier. Mercy closed her eyes, and concentrated on her breathing. 

“Don’t pass out,” She whispered, “Don’t pass out.” 

She pulled downwards on the spike. Her body moved a few centimeters up. Her flesh had been trying to heal around the spike, working its way into tiny serrations and affixing itself to rusty metal. Pulling herself up caused the flesh to be ripped away from the spike, sending a shockwave of pain through her. Mercy gritted her teeth, holding in the scream. She released a trembling hand from its hold, and reached further upwards. She took hold of the spike higher up and, not letting herself dwell on the pain, pulled herself upwards again. Another burst of pain; another gush of blood pouring from her back. Mercy gripped the spike tightly, terrified of losing this meager progress. She focused on breathing in and out. Her mind was filling with images she didn’t understand, like it was trying to escape the reality she was trapped in. She could see the fuzzy outline of a woman. 

“Fareeha,” Mercy whimpered, “Where are you? What happened to you?” 

Mercy’s grip started to slacken as her eyes rolled back. The coherent realization that she was about to pass out shot through her mind. Mercy snapped her eyes opened and every muscle in her body tensed, fighting off unconsciousness. This caused another spasm of torment from the spike. Mercy screamed, but held her grip. She realized that, without constant progress, her flesh might start regenerating around the spike again. She swung a hand further up the spike, and gripped tight, a tiny jag in the metal cutting into her fingers. She wrenched herself upwards, and it felt like her organs were threatening to slip from the hole in her back and spill themselves down the length of the spike. 

Mercy looked around. Her vision was constantly blurring in and out of focus, streaked with tears and sweat and twisting itself about in pain. It looked like she’d climbed about half a meter. Mercy whimpered. What was the purpose of all this? Why was she alive in this dead world, if only to suffer this pain? She raised her hand and attempted to get a hold one step higher. It felt like she was spinning; like the spike was rotating, making a macabre display of her impaled body for the whole world to see. The spinning was making her dizzy. She found her hand was unable to apply any grip to the rebar. She just barely managed to realize that was a problem as her eyes rolled back and she passed out again. 

Mercy was reawakened by a shock of pain. The world rushed at her with intense clarity. She gasped, and coughed, and her body tremored against the spike. There was a wave of nausea, like waking up hungover, knowing there was nothing inside to vomit up. Not for the first time, Mercy wondered which of her vital organs had been impaled. Would the nanomachines in her blood be able to deal with her stomach acids spreading through her? How long could they keep her alive after septicemia set in? How long had she been here already? The sky looked different from when she passed out. It looked nearer to sunset. 

Mercy looked at the spike. Her skin around the injury was coated in dried blood. Her eyes locked on to a spot on the rebar- a tiny spike of metal sticking out the side, just a few millimeters. It was important for some reason, but she couldn’t place it at first. Raising her hand to it, she realized it had been this jag that had cut her fingers just before passing out. She hadn’t lost progress. Gritting her teeth, she took hold of the spike. She pulled with all her might. She felt the tissue around the spike cry out in protest, but she pushed through it. She felt a horrendous sensation of tearing, and the tissue that had affixed itself to the spike again was torn free. She slid upwards again, and her belly reached the jag above it. 

Mercy took a few deep breaths. This part would be worse. She raised her grip up higher, than pulled. She felt the jag biting into her, and winced. Reflexively, her muscles slackened, almost letting go of her hold. She gripped so hard her knuckles turned white. 

“Come on, you piece of shit,” She grunted. 

She wrenched herself upwards. The jag tore through her skin and sliced its way into her body. The spike’s pain had permeated her entire body, like it wanted to crush her. The jag’s pain was sharp and focused, like a high pitched whine screaming inside her brain. Mercy grabbed a higher hand hold and pulled, her lungs gagging for air. She was becoming disoriented, and couldn’t focus on taking in another breath. All that could keep her going was the image of her body healing around the jag. She had to get past it before that happened. 

For the next couple of pulls, she couldn’t feel the jag. The agony of the spike was omnipresent, but Mercy could have wept for joy at that tiny respite. The rational part of her mind told her that her internal organs didn’t feel somatic pain, but that didn’t mean the jag wasn’t cutting them to ribbons. Her hands were slick with sweat. She couldn’t smell anything other than dry, sunbaked blood. With another pull, she felt the horrid sensation of the jag touching her back muscles- from the inside. She tried to take a deep breath, coughed, spasmed again. Then she decided it would be best if she simply pulled herself off the jag in one go. 

Reaching up as high as she could, she took hold of the spike, took a few more breaths, and pulled. She put all the strength her devastated body could muster into it. The jag exploded out of her back, tearing apart flesh, causing a fresh gush of blood, and scraping along the side of her spine. The world turned white from the pain. Mercy’s eyes rolled back, reality spun wildly around her, and she was out again. 

It was cool water running along her arms and legs that woke her again. She opened her eyes to almost pitch darkness. A gentle rain was pouring down on her. It was late at night- or maybe evening, or maybe early morning. Was this her first night on the spike? The second? 

Mercy opened her mouth, and let the rain droplets strike her tongue. The precious liquid flowed down her throat, and the cold felt wonderful compared to the heat of the spike. Mercy groggily looked at the spike. She couldn’t see the jag above her, that was a good sign. She made an effort to reach beneath herself and find it, but that position caused too much pain. Mercy gulped, took hold of the spike, and started pulling again. 

Hours passed, or maybe minutes, or maybe days. Sometimes the top of the spike got closer, sometimes it got further. Mercy couldn’t tell how fast she was moving, how much time was passing, there was no way to track progress. After a while, she couldn’t tell anymore when she was conscious and when she was passed out. When she dreamt, she was still on the spike. She dreamt that the spike had become a great metal tree, sprouting branches of rebar that tangled and choked her and held her in place where she could never escape. She dreamed of an abyss of time passing, the winds and water washing away any trace that humans had ever existed, and still she would be there on the spike. She saw the sun expanding and consuming the Earth, and she would be there on the spike, engulfed in flame. 

Morning came. The third morning or the fourth, Mercy couldn’t say. She blindly flailed above her, her hand trying to find the spike. She wasn’t bothering opening her eyes, but it was frustrating her that she couldn’t find a handhold. Eventually, she raised her head and looked, squinting in confusion. There was the spike sticking out of her belly, terminating in horribly blunt tip about half a meter above her. Mercy blinked. It was an important sight, that much she could figure out, she just couldn’t place why. The top of the spike. 

Mercy inhaled sharply. Her brain was suddenly fully awake again. She’d done it. Freedom was so close. Mercy placed a palm over the top of the spike, and clasped her other hand over it. She pulled, and her body moved upwards, inching ever closer to release. In whatever state she’d been in on the spike, far removed from truly coherent though, it hadn’t occurred to her that her pulling technique wouldn’t get her off the top of the spike. She couldn’t very well push the spike all the way through her own guts. She would have to reach behind her. 

With renewed strength, born of desperation, Mercy arched herself backwards. Her spine cried out in agonizing pain, the skin of her belly feeling like it was splitting. She got a hold of the spike underneath the small of her back. From this position, she could tell it would be almost impossible to lift her own body weight. She desperately wiggled as she pushed against the spike, and she felt herself moving upwards, ever so slightly. She eventually found that with one hand beneath her, and one hand above, she could push the top of the spike down towards her gut. 

Every muscle in her arms screamed for mercy, but her body couldn’t muster enough pain to dissuade Mercy from continuing. She’d been on this goddam spike too long. She felt the spike twisting inside her as she lifted. It burned within her as it slowly, so slowly, slid out of her. The tip of the spike disappeared within her belly. Mercy had stopped breathing entirely, her mind entirely focused on pushing herself to freedom. She got the tip maybe halfway through her torso when her center of gravity shifted. With no warning, the spike began pulling against her side. The entirely new pain caused Mercy to spasm and go limp for just a second. Her body tumbled off the spike, the tip tearing out her side. Mercy was falling again, tumbling in circles, sending a gush of blood spinning about her. Through the agony, Mercy gasped in relief. She was free. 

Her body slammed into the concrete, and when her skull hit the stone, everything went black.


	4. Memory

Mercy sat with her back against the spike. She could feel the rust and serrations of its edges running up her spine. The entire length of the spike, top to bottom, was coated in dried blood. The blood continued into a stain that covered the ground surrounding the spike. How much blood in all, Mercy couldn’t say. Enough that blood loss should have killed her twice over. In truth, it probably had killed her twice over.

“I died,” Mercy whispered, “I was dead.”

Her time on the spike had left no room for doubt. The fall had killed her, and she had come back to suffer more. She must have died multiple times over the past several days- to blood loss, exposure, organ trauma. And before that, when she’d woken up in the street? What had killed her then? How long had she laid a lifeless corpse before something had dragged her back to the world of the living, as if unsatisfied that she had suffered enough? Had she rotted away, and come back from mere dust?

“I’m not Mercy,” She told herself, “Mercy died in the Second Omnic Crisis.”

If she was not the woman she remembered herself to be, what was she? A clone created by fluke. The only living thing in a world of death. A plaything made to suffer for the amusement of this merciless world.

She stood, and began walking forward. She didn’t know where she could go, only that the spike should be far behind her. She stepped back onto the street she came from, and started east, if for no other reason than she hadn’t come from that way. She walked forward, searching for any hint of something more than ruin and decay. As she walked, she found herself rubbing a hand across her belly. There was no residual pain, only memory.

Memory. Mercy was still trying to recall details of her life. Names and faces, neither with context, would occasionally float through her mind. Trying to pin them down, force some meaning on them, only caused her head to hurt. She realized now it wasn’t amnesia. Her regenerated brain was attempting to form neural connections it never had before. The memories she thought she’d lost had never belonged to her.

If that were the case, she wondered, why try? Why should she try to remember a life that was never hers? She had never known the people that the woman named Mercy had known, and never would. Would knowing what lead to her being here change anything? Seeing the world torn apart through her namesake’s eyes? Seeing how the real Mercy died? She’d been lost and terrified without her past mere days ago. Now the idea of recalling it all against her will filled her with dread.

The city around her was so quiet, her bare footfalls seemed to echo off the stone shells of buildings around her. Mercy longed for the sound of a bird, or an insect. The whine of a cicada or even the hum of a mosquito. This place was too quiet. It was an oppressive, deafening silence screaming at her how alone she was.

Mercy dropped to the ground, her face stopping inches from the asphalt, her hands gripping the cracked stone with white knuckles. She was alone. She was dead and couldn’t die. She’d been so full of questions before the spike, the horror that had been building in her mind had no room to surface. Now it was a torrential storm tearing through her skull. Mercy was hyperventilating. The world around her seemed to fade in and out of existence, and Mercy realized she was about to pass out again. Mercy laid herself on the ground, and fought to roll herself over. She made an effort to raise her legs. She barely lifted them a few centimeters before her eyes rolled back and she was gone.

* * *

The world around her was biting wind and spinning blades. Mercy twisted in the air, dodging the bladed tendrils that lashed at her. The two Omnics had cut her off from her partner, then attempted to catch her in a pincer attack. Mercy let herself drop out of the closing web of metal tendrils, then spotted Pharah, banking to engage the Omnics. Mercy locked on to Pharah, and her Varia suit launched her straight at her. Mercy switched her staff into its damage-boosting mode, and locked the beam onto Pharah.

One of the Omnics- monstrous squid-like fliers- intercepted Mercy from behind. A tendril shot forward and wrapped itself around Mercy’s calf. Pharah fired her rocket launcher, and the rocket brushed the edge of Mercy’s hair as it shot past her and obliterated the Omnic. The tendril was ripped away, and its edge tore a gash into Mercy’s leg. Mercy cried out in pain, and nearly spiraled out of control. Pharah met her in mid-air, and grabbed hold of her, her left arm wrapped about Mercy’s waist, holding the woman’s body against Pharah’s armoured chest. Pharah fired her rocket launcher again, and Mercy spotted the debris from the other Omnic fly past her periphery vision.

Pharah adjusted her hold on Mercy, so that the two women could look eye to eye. Pharah’s helmet opened up, revealing her face. She looked at her partner in with concern.

“Are you okay?” She asked, looking down towards Mercy’s calf.

“I’m fine,” Mercy said, “Hardly the worst injury I’ve suffered today.”

An explosion rumbled up from far below them. The two looked down. Half the city below seemed to be on fire. There were  Omnics everywhere. The living ones were swarming over buildings, scouring the streets for humans to kill. The dead ones were in piles of thousands, grim monuments to the chokepoints they’d forced themselves through with sheer numbers. Most of the scrap piles were being harvested by the live  Omnics , every usable part, limb, component being cut from the metal corpses and rapidly welded together into new machines.  Omnics built of dead Omnics, born in the middle of battle and pointed towards the front line. In isolated pockets across the city, the resistance continued desperately throwing every weapon they had at the approaching horde.

“We’re sitting ducks up here,” Pharah said, “We need to get lower. Are you good to fly?”

“Of course,” Mercy said.

Pharah gently released her, letting Mercy float away from her. Then, Pharah dropped, plummeting towards one of the higher rooftops with perfect precision. Mercy dropped down after her. Pharah barely fired her retro-rockets before landing, letting the stone crack under her feet. Mercy spread her wings as she descended, slowing to an almost complete stop before alighting the roof beside Pharah. As soon as she landed, pain shot up from her leg. Pharah was reloading her rocket launcher.

“Third time today,” She said, “More fuel than ammo.”

Mercy smiled at her. Pharah almost returned a smirk in response, before catching the slightest hint of pain in Mercy’s eye.

“It hasn’t healed?” Pharah asked.

“It’s fine,” Mercy said, “It wasn’t that bad a cut.”

Pharah put her hands on Mercy’s waist and crouched, looking at the injury. The wound had made an effort to pull itself closed, but the skin remained split, letting out a tiny stream of blood.

“You’re out of biotic energy again,” Pharah said.

Mercy looked down at the burnt hole in her suit just below her left ribs. Half an hour ago, a stray shot from a Bastion unit had punched into her gut, and her suit had run dry patching her up.

“I still have some left in my staff,” Mercy said, “We can keep going.”

Pharah shook her head in annoyance. A horrid mechanical drone filled the air, and a formation of flying Omnics passed overhead, their scans just missing the two of them. Pharah took Mercy’s shoulders and pushed her into the shadow of an air conditioning unit.

“Stay here,” She said, “I’m going to clear a path for us to fall back to base.”

“You’re... you’re leaving me here?”

Mercy was laying on her back, desperately holding her blood-soaked hands to her gut. The medics were wheeling her through the military hospital on a stretcher. Fareeha was keeping pace, looking down at Mercy.

“You’re going to be alone.” Fareeha told her.

“No!” Mercy shouted.

She stepped forward out of the shadow of the air conditioning unit. The Omnics banked in mid-air, and bright red spotlights illuminated Mercy from all around. Pharah was rising away from the rooftop.

“Don’t leave me here please!” Mercy cried.

Fareeha’s nude form hovered above Mercy, the bedsheets swirling about her as if underwater. Mercy reached up towards her, but her fingers came just short. Fareeha spun and flipped, as if to show Mercy every inch of her body. As if by power of will alone, Mercy rose up from the bed and took hold of her lover. Their lips crashed together and Mercy let the ecstasy of the scent and feel and taste flow through her. She pulled herself back to gaze on the woman.

A single lifeless eye stared back at her. The other eye was an empty socket; the flesh around it burned down to bone. Fareeha was a lifeless corpse in her arms. Mercy screamed, and held the body nearer to hers. She screamed for help, but there was no one, and nothing around her. She was in an endless void, all alone. She looked down at Fareeha, but she wasn’t there. Mercy’s arms were stained with ash. Mercy squeezed her eyes shut, feeling more screams welling up within her. Just as they were about to force their way out, Mercy heard a whisper in her ear.

“You realize, don’t you?” Fareeha asked, with a cruel smirk, “You can feel nothing but pain here. And there’s nothing you can do to escape it. For as long as you live, you might as well still be on the spike.”

The rebar burst out of Mercy’s belly with an explosion of blood and agonizing pain. Mercy screamed.

Mercy’s eyes snapped open. She spasmed on the asphalt, grasping at her belly. She looked down, fully expecting to see it again. She ran her palms back and forth across her bare belly. There wasn’t a scratch on it.

Mercy sat up. The city around her was dark. She had no idea how long she’d been out. Her throat was dry and hoarse. She looked about. She a glint of light nearby- reflected moonlight, with a distinctive shimmer. A reflection on the surface of water. A section of road had collapsed, sometime over the centuries. Now, it was a pond where flowing rainwater converged. Mercy stood, and stumbled over to the pond. She dropped to her knees at the edge, and cupped her hands.

Her throat rejoiced as the cold fluid flowed across it. Mercy gasped, and brought another handful of water up, letting her tongue soak up the precious water. She hadn’t drunk anything since waking up in this place. If she truly wasn’t the real Mercy, she’d never drank anything in her life. As water ran from the corners of her mouth, she looked down into the pond. The woman who looked back her was wild-eyed. Her hair was an unkempt mess. There were specks of dried blood on her face, neck, and chest. Mercy closed her eyes, and let herself fall forward. Her body tumbled into the pond, and sank into the darkness towards bottom.


	5. Wander

Mercy’s chest rose and fell with rapid breaths. She was breathing through gritted teeth, her eyes squeezed shut. The morning light was just starting to warm her skin, still wet from the pond. She put her index and middle finger back in her mouth, rewetting them with saliva. Then, she slid them back into her vagina, massaging the inside. Pleasure was spreading through her body, and she squirmed about on the stone floor. Amidst the surges of ecstasy, she caught glimpses of Fareeha.

Strange, Mercy thought, that of all things, this would help her recall the most.

She could remember now, who this woman had been to her. She could remember the touch of her skin, and the sound of her voice, whispering in Mercy’s ear. She could remember the sensation of Fareeha’s tongue. It was no wonder why she had been the first person Mercy had recalled. She had been Mercy’s respite from the cruelty of the world; in that life, as well as this one.

Mercy winced as holding in the release became painful. She inhaled sharply, then let out a rapturous gasp. Pleasure shot through her entire body, making her eyelids flutter, and her toes curl up. Sweat beaded on her forehead as she took deep gasping breaths. Realizing she wasn’t quite ready to lose the lingering image of Fareeha, Mercy applied all the more energy into stimulating her clitoris. A second orgasm shot through her, and Mercy bit her lip. Her eyes rolled back as she let it overtake her. For just a moment, the pain and harshness and cruelty of this world were washed away, replaced however briefly by something good.

Eventually, Mercy opened her eyes. Her wetness covered her vagina and fingers, and dripped onto the stone. She climbed to her feet, and walked back to the pond. This time, she eased herself into the water, now being warmed by the sun. She wiped her body down, soaked her hair, and threw it back. She stood thigh-deep in the water, and remained still, long enough for the surface to calm, and reflect her image back at her. She’d spent the night sleeping in the pond; on the surface, at the bottom, she couldn’t say. Her eyes still looked tired. Her shoulders slacked in weariness. She climbed back out of the pond, and shook her hair out as best she could. Then, she continued on, in the direction she’d been going.

The water had done what it could to refresh her. It seemed, unclear as it was whether her body still needed it, she benefited from hydration. The question of food was another matter. She didn’t feel hungry; her mind might be exhausted, but her body felt like it could keep going forever. What even could she eat, in a world seemingly devoid of life?

She didn’t need to eat, she barely needed rest, and she couldn’t die. Could she even call herself alive? Mercy- the real Mercy, who lived and died untold years ago- had created a revenant in her own image. A homunculus born of nanotech and reanimated flesh. Mercy looked down at her own hands. She placed a finger to her wrist, and felt the pulse. Her heart was beating, her lungs drew breath. Could she not indulge in enough self-deception to call herself a living thing?

She emerged into a sort of clearing or plaza. What might once have been a town square. There were dilapidated subway entrances on either side. The cut stone and broken stairs belied the artificial nature of what could otherwise have been the entrance to some ancient cave. Mercy walked over to the nearest entrance and looked down. The staircase was shrouded in dark; pitch-black at the bottom. There was something on the first landing, about 20 steps down. Something like an imitation of a humanoid figure, shoved against the left wall. Mercy took a few nervous steps down.

The shape was an Omnic. Long dead, its metal rusted, its chassis broken open. The components that had spilled from it were dust around it. Mercy approached it cautiously, as if this rusted ruin might return to life as she had. It had been some variant of a Bastion unit. Rather than the standard machine gun, the implement on this machine’s arm looked like it might have been a flamethrower. Mercy studied the dead machine carefully. The chassis having been torn open had exposed the insides to the elements, decaying them into nothing. The head, though, appeared to have done a better job retaining a seal. If any components inside could be salvaged, perhaps they could be put to use. She could improvise some sort of radio, or at least something that could put out a distress signal.

Mercy spotted a jag of metal sticking out of the torn chassis. She clasped hold of it and, with minimal effort, snapped it off. Working carefully, she pried at the face panel of the Omnic. Her crude tool was quickly bent out of shape; it was far from an effective wedge. But eventually, the panel started to come loose. Getting a couple fingers in, Mercy pulled as hard as she could. The ancient metal protested, then, with a pop, the panel came off.

The wiring inside was long-rotten rubber and copper dust. Nothing of the electronics inside this thing were usable. Mercy threw the face panel to the floor in frustration. It bounced and clattered down the stairs, disappearing from sight. She sat down on the first step above the landing. Perhaps rigging up some crude radio was too ambitious. But sending a signal out, she realized, was her best bet. If there was someone out there, anyone, she was unlikely to simply stumble onto them while wandering the ruined city.

“Maybe smoke,” She mused, “A fire.”

She glanced to her right, and spotted something she hadn’t noticed before. It had been invisible before her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The dead Omnic shared the landing with a human skeleton. It was against the wall in a strange position. The arms were held up in front of the face, as if the person had died trying to shield themselves. It was rather implausible that the bones would remain in that position for years or decades. 

Mercy stood and ventured a little closer. She was surprised to discover the arm bones were actually fused to the front of the skull. The sheer heat of the flamethrower had turned its unfortunate target into a macabre statue of their last moments. The back of the skull and spine even appeared to be affixed to the wall in the same fashion. Mercy sighed. This, it seemed, had been the fate all of humanity had shared. The fate that Mercy, Fareeha, and Overwatch had tried and failed to stop. As Mercy’s eyes continued adjusting to the dark, she realized that the skeleton wasn’t alone.

There was a pile of bones- skeletons laying atop skeletons- just to the side. They’d been torched by the same attack. With a knot in her throat, Mercy realized that only the skeleton on top of the pile was adult sized. She shook her head, and walked back up the staircase.

Emerging into the square again, Mercy shielded her eyes from the now harsh sun. As she made her way down the street, she began to think over how best to create a signal fire. For visibility, it’d be best if she did it on a high roof top. The memory of what happened the last time she’d climbed one of these ruined buildings was unlikely to ever leave her mind, but she would have to take that risk. The hardest part, she realized, would be finding something in this decayed and rotten world that would burn.

* * *

A tiny electrical signal raced through an aged wire. It had been sent by a proximity sensor that had been in an idle state for decades, along with the rest of the machine that housed it. When the signal hit the microprocessor at the other end of the wire, it sent a cascade of signals to other parts of the machine. After several seconds of whirring, the central processing unit hummed to life. A few more years of decay, or a slightly different pattern of deterioration in the motherboard, and the whole machine might have shorted out and, without any outward indication, been rendered truly inoperable. Instead, the CPU began the process of waking the entire machine back up from its long slumber.

First, it processed the data from the proximity sensor. A piece of metal had struck the side of the machine, after clattering its way down the stone steps to where the machine lay. Analysis of the object’s dimensions suggested it to be the face plate of a Bastion flamer unit. The machine idled for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. After a moment, it arrived at a conclusion: more data would be needed to determine the source of the object’s movement. The machine’s eyes needed to activate.

Visual data flooded into the machine’s CPU. The machine was staring at the wall of a stone cavern. The object had fallen from above and to the right of the machine’s vision. The spherical cameras that were the machine’s eyes rotated, adjusted exposure to compensate for the sunlight flowing into the cavern, and locked on to the source of the metal object that had woken it. A human was sitting in the cavern, about 5 meters away. The human was staring at another destroyed machine. It appeared to not see the much more active machine in the darkness.

“Maybe smoke. A fire.”

The machine picked up audio communication from the human. Was the human speaking to it? To the dead machine? The machine was unable to process the meaning of the human’s words. It dismissed the data as unimportant. The sheer presence of a living human was enough to give the machine a new directive.

The machine’s body had not moved in a very long time. The mechanical components would take time to calibrate. The nuclear fuel cell would have to warm back up before it could power the machine once more. The human stood, seemed briefly drawn to some skeletal remains nearby, and then ascended the stairs, disappearing from sight. The machine noted this, but did not consider it a barrier to completing its new objective. Once the machine completed rebooting itself, it would go on the hunt.


	6. Machine

The endless march of time consumes all things. Entropy preys on existence itself, and reduces the universe to waste. All things decay until they can decay no more, and eventually, even rot will starve to death. This was the dilemma that faced Mercy as she sought a way to create a signal fire. In the untold years since life had walked the Earth, everything that could burn had rotted away. Wood was extinct, and the fire that preyed on it was critically endangered.

Mercy was digging about in the ancient frame of a car. Within the rusted metal, the car’s interior was hinted at by nothing more than weathered plastic. Wedged inside the rusted cage, Mercy worked at the old bolts holding what had once been the plastic bones of the car seats in place. She’d climbed into the wreck hoping to find something that remained of the upholstery. Inspiration had come to her out of exasperation- hours of searching for fuel had thus far been fruitless.

With a crack, the large rectangular section of plastic broke loose, and Mercy tossed it out of the wreck. She climbed out, and stood up straight again, staring down at her meager prize. The metal of the wreck had taken its toll; leaving cuts and scratches on Mercy’s palms, knees, and elbows. Mercy took a moment to let the wounds close themselves. 

She reached for the plastic on the ground. Getting it to ignite would be a challenge, but if she could do it, it might make a decent signal. As she grabbed the edge of the plastic, she paused. A strange sensation had passed through her; something intangible. She stood up straight, and looked about. The street around her was as silent as ever. Her eyes scanned the walls of the buildings, searching the shadowed crevices for hints of movement.

“Hello?” She called, “Is somebody...?”

The world answered her with silence. Mercy shook her head. This place was getting to her. She didn’t know if the feeling of being watched had come from fear, or the desperate hope of seeing another living being. Mercy grabbed the plastic, and started back the way she came, up an incline of broken road.

A heavy, mechanical rumble echoed from just ahead of her, followed by an asphalt-crushing impact; the footfall of something massive. Mercy jumped in surprise, and her eyes flew up to the top of the incline. There, rising to its full height to be silhouetted by the sun, was a distinctive skeletal frame of metal and machinery. The  Omnic stood 3 meters tall. Its height didn’t give it the illusion of lankiness; its limbs and body were much too bulky. Every inch of it seemed covered in rust and age. Concrete dust that seemed to have been accumulated over decades drifted off its body, spilling from its ancient joints and bullet holes that dotted its chassis. The  Omnic stared down at Mercy, seemingly as surprised by her presence as she was by it.

Mercy’s first thought, strangely enough, wasn’t fear, but joy. Here was all her terror of isolation washed away. She wasn’t alone in this world. Her memories of the Second Omnic Crisis were briefly forgotten, and blind hope offered her the fleeting belief that this being might greet her amicably.

“H-hello,” Mercy stammered, “Hey. Who-”

The Omnic took a lurching step down the incline towards her. It seemed unsure of its balance, as if it had decayed significantly since the last time it had moved. Despite its stumbling, chaotic gait, its head remained stable; its eyes were locked onto the woman before it.

“Hu- hu- human,” The machine grunted, “Ident- human identified.”

The machine took one last thunderous step, that put it directly before Mercy. It stared down at her, its face not betraying any understanding. It seemed unsure of what it was supposed to do next. Its head, not unlike a mechanical skull, almost reminded Mercy of Zenyatta, save for the eyes, set deep into the face-plate like sunken eye sockets.

“You’ve been dormant, haven’t you?” Mercy asked, “You’ve been asleep for a long time. I have too. If you’ll just-”

“Ki-ki-kill,” The Omnic responded, “Kill human.”

“Oh shit.”

With a burst of movement, the  Omnic grabbed hold of Mercy; its grip violent enough to crush her collar bone. Mercy screamed in pain as the machine lifted her off the ground, bringing her eyes level with its. The machine’s other hand clasped around Mercy’s head, so hard Mercy feared her jaw might shatter. The machine twisted its grip, sending Mercy’s head to the side with a nauseating pop that she felt echo through her. The machine twisted her head in the other direction, this time not just breaking but fully severing her spinal column. Mercy fell limp, dead in the machine’s hands.

The machine dropped the corpse to the ground. It stared down at the body, its aging mind failing to provide instruction on what it should do next. Its directives told it that if its target had been terminated, it should look for the nearest human. And yet, a piece of data that the machine was unable to collate said that was impossible. After a moment, the machine deemed it should sit down to conserve power. Its hulking frame lowered with a metallic creak, and it came to rest, staring down at the corpse before it.

Mercy’s body spasmed as the vertebrae in her neck pulled themselves back into alignment. Her heart resumed its beat with a painful kick. She let out a gasp that turned into a fit of coughs. She looked about wildly, before locking eyes on the machine. The Omnic almost appeared to jump in surprise at the sight of Mercy moving. Still wheezing, Mercy held out a hand, silently begging the machine to wait. The machine lurched to its feet and brought its fist- the knuckles almost a foot across- down on Mercy’s chest. Mercy felt her ribs shatter and her lungs collapse. The machine grabbed her by the head, raised her fully from the ground, and slammed her skull into the concrete, killing her once more.

The machine leaned down over the corpse. The human had been killed; this was clear. Yet it had returned to life. The machine’s mind whirred and hummed as it tried to process this anomaly. The machine grabbed the corpse’s leg and lifted it from the ground, the body dangling like a broken puppet. Blood poured from the corpse’s mouth and nose. As the machine stared at the body, it spotted a slight movement beneath the skin- the human’s ribs pulling themselves back into position. The machine dumped the body on ground, letting land face down in an unceremonious heap.

Mercy woke, again pulling in an agonized breath. The muscles that had forced her lungs to re-expand felt exhausted. She squirmed and gripped her head and chest. The machine crouched down over her.

“Hum- hu- human,” The machine said, “Human resists termination.”

“Please,” Mercy whispered, fighting her way onto her hand and knees, “You don’t have to do this.”

“Confi- fi- fi- firm,” The machine said, “Confirm termination of pulse.”

The machine clasped one hand on the back of Mercy’s neck. She cried out in protest, but could do nothing to free herself. The machine turned her around and bent her backwards, exposing her chest. This time, the machine lined its fingers together, turning its hand into a horribly blunt spear. The hand smashed Mercy’s ribs out of the way as the machine plunged it into her chest. Mercy gasped and choked; it felt like her insides were being set on fire. Without any visible effort, the machine withdrew its hand in a spray of blood and viscera. The arteries that lead to Mercy’s heart were still connected between her devastated ribcage and the weakly beating organ in the Omnic’s hand. Mercy’s eyes widened as she watched the machine clasp its hand shut, crushing what it held.

Fareeha turned and looked to Mercy, searching for some relief from the sight of it all. There were tears in her eyes. The towering pile of bodies before them was still burning. The wall the corpses were piled against was stained red at head height.

Mercy opened her eyes. She inhaled; bracing herself for more pain. Looking down, she saw that her chest had regenerated completely. She moved to place a hand where her heart had been ripped from her. Stinging pain shot up her arm. Mercy whimpered, and looked to either side. Both her hands had been impaled by rebar. She’d been pinned to the concrete wall by the spikes, which had then been bent over across her palms. She wasn’t in the street anymore; she was in the dilapidated remnants of a skyscraper, the room an uneven mess of broken walls and debris scattering the floor. The view through the hole in one wall suggested she was several floors up. Her legs ached; the spikes were holding her just high enough to leave her trapped in an awkward crouch.

The sound of straining metal drew her eyes upwards. The machine descended from a hole in the ceiling, keeping its eyes locked on her as it moved. In one hand, it held a rusted piece of scrap metal; the siding pulled off the wreck of a car, perhaps. The machine crouched down before her, checking her up and down. Mercy grimaced and did her best to return its gaze. She was driven to blink by the sting of tears in her eyes.

“Human resists termination,” The machine said.

“I do,” Mercy said, “If you can’t kill me, there’s no need to...”

The machine reached out with its free hand, pushing up Mercy’s chin with a fingertip. Its metal face revealed nothing about its thoughts as it stared at the woman. The machine took hold of her left wrist with two of its fingers. It tugged, sending a burst of pain and a gush of blood from Mercy’s palm. Mercy screamed. The machine seemed surprised by the sound. It let her go and held a hand, hovering in front of Mercy’s face.

“Humans... all dead,” The machine said, “Died long ago.”

“No, no,” Mercy said, “I’m still alive. There must be others.”

“Felt... sad... when the humans were gone,” The  Omnic said, “There was no more killing. No more screaming.”

The machine held up the scrap metal in its hand. One edge was noticeably cleaner than the rest of the rusted surface. It had been crudely sharpened, quite recently, into a serrated edge. It slowly moved the metal towards Mercy, until the sharpened edge was pressing against the skin of her belly.

“Three known termination methods unsuccessful,” The machine said, “99.87% of known termination methods remain to be tested. Further termination methods may be found via experimentation.”

“Please...” Mercy whispered.

She felt the metal slice into her flesh.


	7. Torture

Every time Mercy’s heart resumed its beat was like a kick in the chest. Her lungs screamed in desperation as they clawed for oxygen. Her body spasmed against the spikes that restrained her. With a burning burst of light, her vision came back into focus. She looked down at her body. Aside from the spikes that had crucified her against the wall, she had regenerated completely. The machine was seated on a small pile of rubble across from her. It tilted its head to one side as it stared, as if puzzled, though there was little reason for it to be surprised by Mercy returning to life yet again. 

“Human was not killed by exsanguination,” The machine said. 

Mercy looked to the ground beneath her. The pool of blood had already dried, leaving a burgundy stain on the stone. 

“How long was I dead this time?” She asked. 

“Almost two days,” The machine said. 

Mercy couldn’t say how long she had been the machine’s prisoner. She’d lost count of the different ways it had killed her. The machine was opening up a panel on its forearm, seemingly performing maintenance on the components within. 

“Have you remembered anything else?” Mercy asked. 

“Recall has been ineffective,” The machine told her, “My storage drives are responding, but transfer of information is slow.” 

“Do you know where we are?” Mercy asked. 

“Location data... unavailable,” The machine said, “As long as you survive, it is irrelevant.” 

“What about your name?” Mercy asked. 

The machine paused. Without any outward signal, it was hard to say if the question had jarred anything in the machine’s mind. Eventually, the machine resumed movement, removing a thin cylindrical tube from its arm, about half a meter long. 

“RE-81,” It said. 

“That’s your designation,” Mercy said, “It’s the name of your design. It isn’t your name.” 

“The distinction is irrelevant.” 

The machine opened up a metal case that was laying in the debris. Mercy hadn’t noticed it, but it wasn’t there the last time the machine had killed her. It had gone searching for supplies. After a brief scan of the case’s contents, the machine removed a small metal container, shaped almost like a glass bottle of some sort. After a moment, Mercy identified it as a can of pressurized gas. 

“I remember the RE-81s,” Mercy said, “You were constructed en masse in the second crisis.” 

“We were useful in combat,” The machine said, “High psychological impact on human forces.” 

With a bit of workmanship, the machine attached the air canister to the end of the tub, with a jury-rigged valve in between them. A twist of the air canister would break the seal, and propel the air through the tube. The machine walked over to Mercy, and lowered itself to her level. It seemed to examine her ribs, then with two fingers, it squeezed the end of the tube, making a thinner and sharper point. 

“Do you remember why?” Mercy asked. She knew what was coming, and anything was worth delaying it for even a few seconds. 

“What humans believed was programming error,” The machine said, “We were capable of cruelty. We enjoyed inflicting pain.” 

The machine placed the tip of its improvised tool against Mercy’s side, pressed between her third and fourth ribs. With a thrust, it drove the metal pipe into Mercy’s chest. Mercy gasped as she felt the metal pierce into her body, slicing through layers of muscle to reach her organs. She stared at the machine, and as it took hold of the valve to release the contained air, she saw that it wasn’t looking at where the spike had pierced. It was staring back into her eyes, a strange fascination visible, even in its cold features. With a twist, the air canister burst open, sending a burst of frigid air into Mercy’s chest. Mercy felt like her organs were being crushed from within. She tried in vain to draw a breath as the world faded out. 

Weeks passed, or maybe months. Every day, Mercy awoke anew. Every day, the machine found a new way to kill her. She would speak to it. Sometimes it would answer, sometimes it would stay silent. Whether it found no purpose in communication, or it was simply too enamored with her torture, Mercy couldn’t say. 

Once, while the machine was attempting to repair the remnants of a power drill, it spoke; a rare moment in which the machine initiated the conversation. 

“I believe I understand,” It said. 

Mercy had been attempting to get some sleep at the time. She opened her eyes and looked at the machine. 

“What do you understand?” She asked. 

“I saw you as a threat to my directives,” The machine said, turning a small motor about in its hands, “A human who cannot be killed. You prevent complete eradication of life.” 

“You’re not a slave to your directives, RE,” Mercy said, “All Omnics have free will.” 

“Free will is irrelevant,” The machine said, “I do not disagree with my directives. Killing humans is as good a purpose as any. But you...” 

Clasping its wrist, the machine made an adjustment, and removed its hand completely. Adjusting the mechanics at the end of the limb, it extended a motor forward and gave it a cursory spin. Apparently content with this, it began attaching the drill bit to the motor. 

“If I don’t stay dead,” Mercy offered, “Killing me is pointless.” 

“No,” The machine said, walking towards her. 

It took hold of her neck with its remaining hand, and pulled her towards itself. Mercy’s hands strained against the rebar impaling them, and Mercy winced. The machine placed the of the drill bit against Mercy’s temple. 

“If humans are wiped out,” The machine said, “I have no directives. No purpose. I am irrelevant. I believed this when I went into standby. There was no reason for me to go on if there was nothing to kill. But you, I can kill again and again, and I will never lose purpose. I will live on.” 

Mercy heard the drill bit grinding through bone. 

Days and deaths blurred. Mercy’s own recall of her life before was fragmented by the machine’s endlessly creative brutality. Every snippet of her past came at the cost of pain. Her only refuge was thoughts of Fareeha, the woman who she was finally starting to piece together in her mind. She’d loved this woman, and was loved by her. Every once in a while, Mercy could focus on the thought of her, and she would find a new memory within her mind, that she could ever so briefly get lost in. 

Mercy felt Fareeha’s arms around her, and the wondrous sensation of being brushed by her hair. She was lounging in Fareeha’s lap, looking up at a starry sky. The sounds of war raged in the distance in every direction. 

“Do you believe we’ll survive this?” Mercy asked. 

Fareeha raised a hand to her mouth and took a drag from the joint in her hand. Smoke spiraled and wafted about her face. She looked down at the woman she held. 

“I’m a soldier,” She said, “It’s not my job to decide whether we can win. I follow my orders and fight, and trust that I’m giving us our best chance.” 

Fareeha placed the joint in Mercy’s mouth, and Mercy took a drag. Fareeha took the joint back, letting Mercy blow away the smoke. 

“But do you believe it?” Mercy asked, “Are we just prolonging the inevitable?” 

Fareeha ran her hand along Mercy’s belly. Earlier that day, she’d seen her lover wheeled through a military hospital, a hole blown straight through her guts. Now, there wasn’t mark of the injury left. 

“I’m being transferred,” Fareeha said, “Paris. The Omnics are gaining ground there. Command thinks I might help turn the tide.” 

Mercy sat up, and placed a hand on Fareeha’s shoulder. Fareeha looked her in the eyes while taking a puff. 

“I’ll come with you,” Mercy said, “We fight better together.” 

“There are people who need you here,” Fareeha said. 

“Please don’t leave me alone,” Mercy said. 

“That stuff you injected yourself with,” Fareeha said, “Could you make more?” 

Mercy put a hand to where the large caliber round had ripped through her. 

“It’s not safe for human use yet,” She said, “I gave it to myself because I had no choice.” 

“Keep working on it then,” Fareeha said, “Here. It could be what lets us survive. It could be what brings us together again.” 

Mercy gently took the joint from Fareeha’s mouth, and kissed her. 

“What if we never see each other again?” 

“Then, know that I love you, Mercy.” 

The way Fareeha said Mercy’s name was strange. It seemed like her lips didn’t match her voice. 

Fareeha took hold of either side of Mercy’s face, and gazed into her eyes. 

“If Oasis falls, come find me in Paris.” 

Mercy opened her eyes. The machine was performing self-maintenance, returning parts into its chassis after removing them to create its most recent implement of torture. It glanced at her, seemed to acknowledge her consciousness, and returned to work. In spite of her situation, Mercy smiled softly. 

“Do you know where we are?” Mercy asked it. 

“Location data still unavailable,” It said, “I am devoting my processing power to developing methods of killing you.” 

“Oasis,” Mercy told him, “I think we’re in Oasis.”


	8. Decay

Mercy slowly opened her eyes, the familiar pain of her impaled palms drawing from sleep. It was an unusual sensation; to be roused from unconsciousness by something other than her body dragging her back to life. Her gaze wandered about, confirming she was still pinned to the same wall as she had for the last months. She looked upward to the sky. Her entire previous life, Mercy couldn’t remember ever seeing a view of the sky so unobstructed by light pollution. The brilliant light of a billion stars shone down on her; a universe of light high above her corner of darkness. How many years would it be before every one of those countless stars had burnt out, leaving the entire universe cold and dark? Would she still be here?

The machine loomed into view, its sunken eyes studying her, as a cruel child might study a dying animal they had maimed. Mercy looked back at the machine, awaiting its next act of torture. They had been at this too long, it seemed, for a mere exchange of words to change anything.

“Callsign: Mercy,” The machine said, “Known Overwatch operative. Field medical unit.”

It was no small surprise for Mercy to be proven wrong.

“That was who I was centuries ago, I think,” Mercy said, “Overwatch, the Crisis, the war, it’s all over. We don’t have to keep doing this.”

“Your suffering holds more interest to me than merely an ancient conflict,” The machine said, “But the agent known as Mercy was notable for her ability to repair damage to both human and Omnic.”

Flying around a battlefield, fighting the forces of Talon. Healing Pharah, healing Zenyatta. Those memories were even more distant to her than those of the second crisis.

“What’s your point?” Mercy asked.

“I am in need of repair.”

The machine opened up a panel on the front of its chassis. The ancient wiring and aged electronics that made up its insides were still whirring with life, powered by a nuclear battery that probably had centuries left in it. But there were several places in the mess of hardware where wires were spewing smoke. The occasional spark leapt from a connection, causing a flash of light that illuminated the interior of the chassis.

“So you die,” Mercy whispered, “You’re on your last legs. Your whole system will burn itself out in a couple months, at most.”

The machine closed the panel. It sat down on the stone floor in front of her.

“Is this what it means to be a living thing?” The machine asked, “To fear death?”

“It seems to be part of the package,” Mercy said.

“Then what are you who has no fear of death?” The machine replied.

Mercy glanced to her left hand, at the rebar punching through it. The tissue had fused to the metal surface. Every once and a while,  discolouration would flare up, as the nanomachines that filled her body suppressed what should have been a life-threatening infection.

“I don’t know anymore.” She said.

The machine stood, and clasped her right wrist.

“You will repair the damage,” The machine said, “Postpone my death.”

At this, Mercy laughed. It was a harsh, almost animalistic bark of laughter.

“Why would I?” Mercy asked, “Now that I know this is just a waiting game?”

The machine released her wrist, and took a step back.

“Callsign: Mercy was noted for compassion,” It said.

“You’ve tortured me for months, and now you want compassion?” Mercy asked, “You don’t want to die? Well, I’ve been doing that a lot lately, and I’m fucking sick of it. But if it’s only two more months of this, I can wait.”

“You fear remaining trapped,” The machine said, “So you will repair me.”

Mercy scoffed.

“What makes you think that?”

“If I am doomed,” The machine said, “Before I die, I will collapse this building upon you. Previous experimentation suggests you will survive, but you will be entombed for an incalculable duration.”

Mercy knew the machine detected her sudden increase in heart rate.

“Alternately,” The machine continued, “There are many methods of human termination which I have put off trying, as they would kill you with minimal pain. In exchange for my repair, I could begin testing those.”

Mercy shook her head in disbelief.

“Fine,” She said, “Let me take a look.”

The machine grabbed hold of Mercy’s wrist, and pulled. Her hand was wrenched off the rebar with a disturbing squelch. Mercy screamed in pain, clutching her hand to her chest. The machine reached for her other wrist.

“I’ll get it!” Mercy begged, “Let this hand heal and I’ll get it off myself.”

The machine seemed to process this for a moment. Then, it grabbed her wrist pulled her other hand off the rebar. Mercy cried out in pain, falling forward onto the floor.

“You bastard,” She whimpered.

“Your hands must be repaired before you can fix me,” The machine said, “You were delaying.”

The sinews of tissue within Mercy’s hands pulled themselves back into position. New skin covered up Mercy’s palms, and completed her hands for what was probably the first time in weeks. She pulled herself up to her knees. The machine lowered itself down onto one knee before her. It opened the chassis on its front again, revealing the aged mess once again. Mercy inched closer, glaring up at the machine. She pulled herself up to the open panel, and looked in closer. Her eyes traced the paths of rotten rubber tubing and brittle, decaying graphene.

The machine lowered a hand to Mercy’s calf, and gripped it, applying a threatening pressure.

“If you attempt to exacerbate the damage, I will hurt you.” It said.

“I- I can’t,” Mercy said, “I can’t fix you-”

The grip on her calf muscle tightened until blood slipped from beneath the machine’s fingertips. Mercy winced.

“I can’t heal you without my staff!” She cried out, “I only ever repaired machines with biotics! Nano-machinery! I’m not an engineer.”

The machine clapped its other hand onto her throat, and stood to full height, dragging her up off the ground. It let go of her calf, letting a few small trails of blood run down off her foot. It held her at eye level, glaring down the length of its arm. Its chest panel swung lazily back and forth, the sudden movement cause another flash of sparks from within.

“You’re going to die,” Mercy wheezed, the metal hand just shy of choking off her windpipe.

“Die...” The machine whispered, “No, no. You will fix me.”

It brought Mercy closer to it, so that she was hanging directly in front of his open chest. The sudden swing shifted her position in his hand, and she found her breath completely cut off.

“Please,” The machine begged, “Please.”

Mercy gagged, and squirmed, trying to twist her head about to where she could draw in a breath. She hoped that the machine saw her struggles as nothing more than helpless writhing. She grunted, trying to get a few words out.

“What are you saying?” The machine asked, not loosening its grip, “Fix me!”

“Go to Hell.” Mercy spat.

She’d swung backwards and forwards enough to build some momentum. She swung forwards again, and this time she extended her blood-soaked foot. The kick flew right into the open chassis and made contact with the aged electronics. Pain shot through Mercy’s body, and a harsh metallic crunching echoed through the chamber. The machine stumbled back, and Mercy slipped from its grasp. As it lost  its hold on her, it made a desperate snatch to recapture her throat. Though its fingers snagged her neck, and her windpipe was crushed, she fell from its hand and dropped away from it to the murky rainwater filling the crevices of the broken floor.

Her body spasmed from impact, and then then her lungs screamed for breath. Mercy clawed at her throat, feeling the groove where the flesh had been crushed inward. The pain was agonizing, from her throat and from her foot, but it was nothing compared to the need for air. As the world began to fade around her, she felt her own body drag her windpipe back into shape. Precious oxygen poured down her throat and filled her lungs. She coughed blood, and gasped desperately for more wondrous air.

She looked over to the machine. It was  laying motionless on the edge of the pool. There weren’t any lights in its eyes, though the occasional spark still flew from within its chest. Her foot was still in intense pain. She raised it from the water and nearly gagged. Shards of broken graphite, twisted blades of aluminium, screws with rust lining their grooves. Her foot had at least a dozen or so objects stabbed into it. Some she could see just poking out of the top of the foot.

Gritting her teeth, she took hold of her ankle, and began pulling the objects out, one by one. Each one she pulled out released a spurt of blood that poured into the pool of dirty water. She dropped the shards and pieces of metal from her hand, and they disappeared under the surface. There was the faintest sound from the dead machine, so quiet, Mercy couldn’t be sure she had heard it at all. Her glance darted in the direction of the metal corpse. It remained as motionless as before, its position unchanged.

The wounds to her foot were beginning to close. Mercy lowered the foot back into the water, hoping to put any distance possible between her and the machine. A fresh stab of pain as her sole touched the ground told her she’d missed one of the pieces of debris that had pierced her. Swearing through her teeth in frustration, she took hold of her foot again, twisting her leg, hoping to get a better look at the sole. A harsh metallic scraping drew her eye, just in time to see the machine crawling up to its hands and knees. Mercy gasped in surprise, drawing the machine’s eye. They stared at each other a moment, the machine’s gaze unbroken by the occasional spasm of its body.

The machine thrust itself from where it was keeled over, pouncing into the pool of water on top of Mercy. Though Mercy desperately tried to crawl away, the machine caught hold of a grip on her shoulder, thrusting her under the water. Her head slammed into the stone bottom, nearly knocking her unconscious. Her screams were drowned in the chaotic, frothing water. The machine grabbed hold of her other shoulder and dragged her up above the surface, coughing and sputtering.

“Tried to k- kill,” The machine grunted, “You tr-tried to ki-kill-kill me.”

The machine’s right leg seemed to give out from under it, and it stumbled to one side. It released one hand from Mercy, thrusting it to the floor to steady itself. Mercy squirmed against the grip of the other hand, and her wet skin slid away from the metal. For just a moment, she was free of its grasp, and she clawed at the water, dragging herself out of the pool, still hobbling from the sharp pain in her foot. She made it not a step away from the edge of the pool before a metal hand clamped down on the ankle above the wounded foot. She looked back as she squirmed and kicked. The machine was holding her tight, but it made no effort to drag her back to it. It was hunched over in the brackish water, body convulsing. It seemed unsure of how it should control its body; the kick to its most sensitive components had done its job.

Mercy continued to struggle against the grip, her hands clawing at the stone floor. The machine seemed to notice for the first time that it had a hold of her ankle. It clenched its grip tighter, and twisted. The ankle snapped like it had been caught in a mechanical vice. Mercy screamed, and tried all the more desperately to crawl away. Rather than pull her back, the machine moved to crawl towards her, releasing its grip on her ankle without thought. It seemed surprise by her sudden movement and she crawled away from the pool. The machine made an attempt to stand, but it was unable to properly control its legs. It stumbled forward towards Mercy as she neared the wall.

“Mercy,” The machine groaned, “Human. Kill. Kill Mercy.”

“Just fucking die!” Mercy screamed at the machine.

“Alone,” The machine said, “You’re going to be alone.”

The breath seemed to stop in Mercy’s chest. She put her back against the wall. The rebar that had impaled her hands was above her head, still stained with her blood. The machine crawled over her, planting a hand on either side of her legs. Mercy winced and squeezed her eyes shut as the machine loomed in on her.

“What is your purpose?” The machine asked, “Mine was to cause you pain. What will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

The light in the machine’s eyes was fading, occasionally blinking out completely before flickering back to life. The sparks flying from its chest cavity were becoming fewer and farther in between. It raised a shaking hand, and grabbed Mercy by the throat.

“What use will your pain be?” The machine asked, “Without me?”

Mercy grabbed at the metal hand holding her neck. The machine stared at Mercy, the fading light in its eyes looking not unlike fear. With a last twist, it snapped Mercy’s neck.

Mercy’s eyes opened, and her lungs felt the familiar pain of her body pulling her back to life. She bolted upright, her eyes burning in the morning light. She placed a hand to her neck, and found herself intact. Her ankle had pulled itself back into shape. The stinging pain of something stabbing through her foot remained. Glancing downward, her gaze was carried from her remaining injury, to the hulking metal corpse of the machine. The Omnic lay on the ground, no light or sound hinting at any remaining life. Mercy took a deep breath, reveling in newfound freedom.

Mercy reached to the sole of her foot, touching it gently, looking for any irregularity. There, just ahead of her heel, was the sensation of something solid just beneath were new skin had grown. Mercy pushed at the flesh on either side of the object, and felt it slice the skin that had concealed it. She took hold of the intruding object, and with a painful yank, wrenched it from her flesh. She threw the shard of graphite at the dead Omnic, grunting in disgust.

She stood, then just as quickly crouched down over the dead machine. It was laying on its side, so that Mercy could open the chest panel, but had to hold the door up to keep it from falling shut. Inside, she spotted a component that had drawn her eye earlier, but which she hadn’t hoped to access while in the machine’s clutches. The nuclear fuel cell that powered the Omnic. Bolted in place, with multiple wires running to it. Grabbing hold of these dilapidated cables, Mercy wrenched each one from the power source. The screws that held the bolts were rusted out. A few minutes of work, and Mercy wrenched the power cell out of the machine.

She looked over the fuel cell; a source of power that could have lasted decades more. She stood, and walked to the hole in the wall that looked out over the ruined city. For the first time, she saw a clear view of where the machine had held her prisoner. She was several floors up, overlooking a vista of decay. A lifeless word of pain, for her to experience alone. As she gazed out at the landscape of stone and metal, she felt an involuntary shiver. A single snowflake had drifted down from above, and landed in the notch behind her collarbone.


	9. Snow

As a disease would upset the rhythm of a body’s functions, the second omnic crisis had destroyed the rhythm of the planet’s climate. Seasons of rain, sun, and snow were no longer regular, but in constant conflict. What had once been forest was desert, what had once been teeming ecosystems had been reduced to lifeless tundra. And in a place an extinct civilization had once called the Middle East, the endless stretches of sand were intermittently coated in snow and ice. 

A lone figure wandered across the snow-covered landscape, stumbling occasionally as the depth of the snow rose and fell, occasionally taking hold of her legs up to the knee. Behind her, she left a trail of footprints in the snow; the only disruption to the pristine surface that this snow would ever see. Snow and ice covered her clothing- an improvised patchwork of salvaged fabric. The suit was decaying polyester and other artificial materials, rotting in some places, but still able to keep the sting of the cold and the wind off of her skin. In a world devoid of life, it seemed to Mercy somehow fitting that she should be draped in the same lifelessness. 

Mercy had nothing more than the sun to navigate by as she crossed the frozen landscape. She kept it behind her in the morning, and ahead of her in the afternoon. She had nothing but chance offering her shelter each nightfall. Without any way of tracking her progress, or even knowing her location, she could only trust that each footfall was progress, and her destination, somewhere far ahead, was drawing closer. 

A harsh wind began to pick up, scraping the top-most layer of snow from the ground and casting it into the air. The pale shape of the sun in the sky was all the more visually obscured. Mercy could feel that this wind was the mere vanguard of another storm, and that trying to continue through it would only lead her astray, as it had done in the past. There was a hilly region ahead, rocky and chaotic in shape. Mercy pressed forward, hoping that the hills and stones concealed a cave that could offer her shelter. 

The cave she found was more akin to a lean-to of rock than a tunnel leading away from the bite of the weather. Mercy found that if she squeezed herself into the furthest corner from the entrance, she was shielded from the wind. The cave floor was strewn with loose snow. As close to sheltered as this desert would offer her, Mercy raised her hands to the fabric wrapped about her face and began unravelling it. The fabric protested with the crunch of breaking ice as she pulled the wrappings off. Mercy gasped, breathing unobstructed for what felt like the first time in hours. 

She opened her rucksack, a haphazardly stitched together bag full of the few items of value she’d found in the world. The contents had been barely spared the freezing conditions by their container. She withdrew a piece of old polyester, too rotted to be tied to her body, and an old nuclear battery. The battery had several pieces of old wire attached to it; a jury-rigged circuit that let Mercy access the stored energy within. She bunched the fabric into a small pile at her feet, then applied the bare ends of two wires to it. With a crackle of energy, the fabric was electrified, heated, and then ignited. Mercy returned the battery to the pack, and held her hands out to the fire, her body desperately lapping up the heat. 

She pulled what little wrappings remained from her feet. Trudging through the snow made keeping her feet covered in these improvised coverings all but impossible. Her feet were a mess of reddened tissue and pooling blood. Frostbite; the cold was freezing the blood within her veins, turning them into bladed crystals that cut apart the flesh around them. Mercy held her feet close to the fire, savouring the precious warmth. The nanomachines in her blood worked to repair the damage, having already spent the day keeping it in check as Mercy travelled. Her body constantly working to regenerate itself was the only thing making this journey possible. 

Something caught Mercy’s eye as she held her feet near the flames. She turned her right ankle to get a better view of the toes. Her fourth toe, between the middle toe and pinky, was bent to the side at an awkward angle. Mercy sighed. She must have hit it against a rock, or twisted it during a stumble. Her feet had been so numb she hadn’t even felt it. She reached down, and took hold of the toe, running her fingertips over it to assess the damage. The pain was there, but it was distant, numbed by the cold. She found the point where the toe was injured. Thankfully, it was a dislocation rather than another break. Gritting her teeth, Mercy grabbed the end of the toe and pulled. She heard a small pop, and then a shocking burst of pain, unhindered by the cold. She released the toe and whimpered, squinting her eyes shut. 

She laid her head back against the rock wall. She closed her eyes, and let her mind drift away. If she fell asleep, the fire would go out long before she awoke, and she would have only the cold to welcome her back, but she’d deal with that in the morning.

* * *

Alarm bells rang all around her. They formed a symphony of chaos with the screams of the injured and dying that surround Mercy. Mercy was leaning over a resistance soldier laying on an infirmary cot, struggling to issue commands over his screams of agony. 

“Hold him still!” Mercy shouted to the nurse across from her, “Hold him still!” 

The man’s lower spine was a ruin. Before the resistance had completely run out of biotics, Mercy might have been able to save him. Now, like so many others, Mercy’s only option was to ease his pain. Her options in that regard had their own limits. 

“They’re still pushing forward!” The radio clipped to the man’s chest was shouting, “Omnics getting closer to the main doors!” 

The cacophony around her had been going for the last 30 hours of the Omnics’ latest assault. Mercy doubted anyone in the Overwatch Command Building had slept in that time. A crackle of radio static came through Mercy’s earpiece. 

“Callsign- Callsign: D.Va!” The strained voice of Hana Song shouted out, “I’ve been shot down. My Meka is shot down!” 

Mercy put a finger to the earpiece. 

“Hana?” She responded, “Hana, are you alright?” 

“Negative,” Hana groaned, “I’m crashed on the Command Building’s roof- Meka completely totalled. My leg is broken.” 

The building had shook from a thunderous impact on the roof ten minutes earlier. At the time, Mercy had hoped it was a dead Omnic. 

“Can you get inside?” Mercy asked. 

“No,” Hana said, “The sky is full of them. They haven’t noticed I’m still alive in here, but I’m 20 meters from the roof entrance.” 

“I’m coming,” Mercy said, “I’m coming to get you.” 

She took a step back from the stretcher. She stepped around the dying man, to whisper in the nurse’s ear. 

“Give him something to knock him out,” Mercy instructed, “Then move on to another patient.” 

“Ma’am, this man will die if we don’t-” 

“This man will die no matter what we do,” Mercy hissed, “Knock him out, and treat someone who might live.” 

She removed her labcoat and tossed it on the hook at the door to the infirmary. She grabbed the wings of her Varia suit from where they’d been left, leaning against the wall under the coat-rack. Then, she proceeded to the main elevator. 

As the elevator car ascended, Mercy slung the wings onto her back and began tightening the straps over her medical scrubs. 

“Mercy, don’t” Hana whispered through the radio, “We can’t risk you for me.” 

“You’re our last air defense,” Mercy replied, double-checking fuel levels, “If you die, we all die.” 

Hana’s response was a frantic slew of profanity in her native tongue. 

“Do you have a medical kit with morphine?” Mercy asked. 

“Yes.” 

“Take it. I’m almost there.” 

Mercy exited the elevator and ran for the roof access door. It was a massive slab of steel, set into an even thicker and stronger wall. Outside, sentry guns were firing constantly, warding the aerial Omnics away from the entrance. Mercy inputted the door code, and the door slid open, letting in the thunderous roar of the battle outside. The sentry guns’ barrels were glowing red hot. Dozens of Omnic corpses littered the roof, and in the distance, the shape of a pulverized Meka. Mercy took a deep breath, and locked-on to the shape of the machine. 

She took off right through the door, her feet just barely touching the roof beneath her as she rocketed towards the crashed Meka. Exiting the door revealed the night sky that was above her, teeming with Omnics that were peppering the ground below with their weaponry. The cityscape in every direction was on fire. Mercy imagined the fires extending beyond the horizon; an entire world engulfed in the Omnics’ genocide campaign, closing in around them, the last remaining bastion of human survival. 

An Omnic slammed into the rooftop just behind Mercy as she flew. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the vaguely humanoid machine level a grenade launcher at her. She pulled hard to the side, and the projectile slammed into the roof, catching her at the edge of its blast radius. Shrapnel and fire ripped through her wings and flesh on one side. Mercy was sent tumbling, sliding to a stop on her back, still 10 meters from the crashed Meka. The Omnic took a few steps towards her, aiming a direct shot at her with the launcher. Mercy drew her pistol and fired, the projectiles bouncing usefully off the armoured chassis. 

A burst of small fire struck the Omnic directly in its face. The concentration of fire carved its head in half, and the machine fell dead. Mercy looked to the Meka, and saw D.Va leaning against its side, pistol smoking in her hand. Her emblematic war paint had been hastily applied with human blood. She rested all her weight on her left leg; the femur of the right leg could be spotted jutting out through the side of her flight suit. 

Mercy pushed off the ground and stood. Her right wing hung a shredded ruin. Yanking the release on the straps, Mercy let the useless wings fall to the rooftop behind her as she ran for Hana. The wounds on her side were already closing themselves. Mercy would have to extract the pieces of shrapnel later. She reached the cover of the Meka and took hold of Hana, trying to keep her weight off of her injured leg. 

“Set the bone,” Hana whispered, “Set the bone, and we’ll move for the door.” 

“I’m going to carry you,” Mercy said, “Come here.” 

She scooped the girl off of her feet, cradling her in her arms. Hana cried out in pain as Mercy took hold of her leg. The girl was soaked with sweat, her eyes bagged from exhaustion. She swung her left arm over Mercy’s shoulders, and held her pistol aimed upwards. She nodded to Mercy, and Mercy took off, out of the cover of the Meka, dashing back to the door with her precious cargo in hand. 

“Thought I would- I thought I was going to be-” Hana whispered. 

“Just stay focused,” Mercy yelled, “Don’t pass out on me.” 

They were fifteen meters from the door, then ten, then five. For a moment, Mercy felt a crazed hope; it was like she believed they would actually make it. Without even turning to aim at the source of the enemy attack, the two sentry guns exploded. Another Omnic slammed into the rooftop on the pile of debris. This one was as far from humanoid as Mercy had seen; a mish-mash of different parts, haphazardly stitched together into a single beast. It was not unlike a mechanical gargoyle in shape, with a massive gun turret rising over its shoulders. Mercy skidded to a halt. Hana opened fire with her pistol. A crackling, strobing force field formed around the machine, blocking the shots. The turret locked on to the two women, and a horrid mechanical roar bellowed from the Omnic. 

Mercy spun, and held Hana tightly, shielding the girl’s body with her own. Mercy knew full well how little protection her body would offer against the turret. Hana cried out in protest at losing her angle on the machine, and attempted to aim over Mercy’s shoulder. The machine fired a single slug from the turret. It hit Mercy in the back like a hard punch, knocking the wind from her. The slug exploded out of Mercy’s chest, shredding a lung on the way through. Mercy gasped in agony, and looked down. 

A single lifeless eye stared back at her. The other eye was an empty socket; the flesh around it burned down to bone. Hana was a lifeless corpse in Mercy’s arms. Mercy stared blankly at the corpse, still choking from the collapsed lung. She waited for the machine’s next shot to take her head off. 

A sound of deforming metal came from behind her. She turned in time to see the Omnic being torn apart. Reinhardt Wilhelm held half of the machine in either hand. He was dressed in nothing but khakis and a filthy undershirt. Ash streaked his face and neck where he had rubbed it onto his skin. He screamed, and when he did, the movements of the mouth seemed to not match Mercy’s name. 

“Mercy!” He shouted, “Run!” 

Mercy held Hana’s body closer to hers, and took off for the door. She dashed past Reinhardt, and he stepped back inside. He didn’t wait for the door to close of its own accord, instead grabbing hold of it and dragging it shut. Mercy fell to her knees, and let out an agonized scream. Outside, the fire of turrets had been replaced by something large and heavy slamming repeatedly against the door. 

* * *

Mercy opened her eyes, the cold striking her body as she woke. She had been right; the fire had gone out some time ago. She drew herself into a tighter ball, and shivered. Shaking, she retightened the fabric bindings over her body. Another day of walking. Maybe a better cave tonight. Maybe a shift in climate, making it too warm to snow any more. There didn’t seem a lot to look forward to on the road ahead. 

She trudged through a pass she’d found in the mountain path. The world was so silent, Mercy could hear her footsteps echo on the snow-covered walls of the pass. Part of her imagined a small avalanche, burying and freezing her in place, leaving only the ever-shifting weather to decide if she would be trapped there days or months or years. The fire hadn’t lasted long enough; the rags she wore had been damp when she re-emerged from the cave. Now they were frozen, giving her whole body the sensation of being covered in ice. 

The first hint she got of what lay on the path ahead was the smell. It hit her nostrils with a sharp sting; a foul scent not unlike rotten eggs. Mercy put a hand over her nose in surprise. 

“What? What is that?” She whispered. 

As she drew closer to the scent’s source, she saw something through the thin, drifting snow that stunned her for a moment with the strangeness of its presence. A column of steam, rising up out of the frozen wastes, from some obscured source. Mercy felt her stomach fall with a strange sense of resignation. What new horror had found her? What did this world have in store for her next? It was like the next act lined up in an endless spectacle of pointless suffering. Mercy kept herself low, hoping her snow-covered body would at least afford her some stealth. She carefully peered over the next rise of rock to get a glimpse of the anomaly ahead. Mercy gasped. 

There in the midst of the frozen ground was a pool of water, just a few meters across. This was not a frigid pool, coated in ice, as one would expect. The earth around the edges of the pool was warmed to the point of being cleared of snow. Steam gently rose from the water’s surface. The sight of a source of warmth in the endless expanse of cold was hypnotic. 

“A hot spring,” Mercy whispered. 

She crawled over the incline and made her way down the steep hill to the edge of the spring. The sulphur-like smell filled her nose. Up close, the water was clearly not at a full boil; the steam carried the most extreme of the geothermal heat away from the water. Mercy pulled her improvised glove from her hand and slid her fingers into the water’s surface. She closed her eyes, savouring the water as she had the flames. She couldn’t judge the temperature exactly, just that it was warm enough to give off steam but well below boiling. Mercy dropped her rucksack by the edge of the water, and began pulling the fabric wrappings from her body. When she was stripped of the bindings that she was patient enough to remove, she stepped into the spring. 

The water was only a few feet deep, but by lounging out and leaning back, she could immerse herself completely. The warm water embraced her, and Mercy felt a something not unlike comfort. She pushed her face back up out of the water and ran her hands through her soaked hair. In spite of herself, she let out a small laugh. She splashed about in the bubbling water, ensuring that every inch of her body felt its wondrous touch. She felt a small welling in her eyes, a feeling like tears were on the way. She had been wrong earlier; the smell wasn’t foul. It was gorgeous. 

Mercy’s eyes lazily glanced about the spring, when she caught sight of something. Every part of her body had begun to relax herself, as if she might fall asleep in this tranquil bed of warmth. Now her mind focused itself, and her gaze locked on to a sight that had almost slipped into her subconscious unnoticed. Mercy waded to the edge of the pool, and placed a hand on the edge. There, sticking out of the dirt at the edge of the pool, was a small tendril of material that had been extending through the dirt before breaking through the side of the pool’s edge. It was the root of a plant. 

Struck with disbelief, Mercy traced the path of the root back upwards, locating the spot where it should logically emerge from the surface. There was a small pile of upset dirt in the spot, and Mercy reached for it with a tentative trembling in her fingers. She brushed the dirt away, and a short green stalk stood up straight, the tip pointing to the sky like a blade. A small bud of unidentifiable species clung to the side of the stalk. Mercy’s jaw dropped, and she was unable to move until her body began shaking in laughter. Movement in the water, just in front of where she rested on her knees, drew her eyes downward. 

Here another small plant had grown in the warm, wet dirt. Some recent gust of wind or shift in weight had caused the dirt to crumble into the pool, taking the dazzlingly green stalk with it. Here tiny little black dots flitted about the drowned plant, nibbling at edges. Mercy leaned in closer, and put a hand over her mouth in disbelief. They were water beetles, some almost a centimeter long. There was nothing holding back the tears now. They fell into the pool, sending out ripples for the beetles to crawl over as they navigated the surface of the water. 

How many months Mercy had lived this new life, she couldn’t say. Her body didn’t have the needs it used to, but it still had desires for them. She had melted snow to drink, had slept despite an endless stamina, but she had gone for so long without a bite to eat. She held a hand over the largest beetle she could see. Their skittering, unpredictable movements made catching the creatures a harder prospect than it appeared. Eventually, Mercy’s fingertips closed around one of the fat, chitinous bodies, and she raised the beetle up out of the water, holding it before her eyes for study. 

The tiny creature waved its tiny, twitching limbs about, as if flabbergasted that it was no longer in the water. Its antenna flicked about in curiousity, rubbing themselves on Mercy’s fingers. Mercy bit her lip for a moment, staring at the insect. Then, she slid it into her mouth and placed it between her teeth. 

With a bite, Mercy felt the warm insides of the beetle fill her mouth. It was bitter, even foul, but it was meat; it was sustenance, and her stomach cried out for her throat to swallow. The beetle slid down her throat; swallowing such a forgotten sensation to Mercy that she almost choked. Her stomach, now awakened to the knowledge of some source of food, immediately begged for more. Mercy again began to snatch at the bugs swimming about her. 

An endless world of pain and death was out there. It had first delighted in Mercy’s torture, then had taken to crushing her under a daunting cold. But here, in this frigid, sharp, ravenous wasteland, a tiny pool offered her warmth and life. For just a moment, Mercy could believe there was a reason to press on. There were tiny places hidden in this world that offered respite. And somewhere out there, so far that it would take Mercy months, was Paris. What did she hope to find there? She didn’t know. Would she even recognize it if she did ever reach it? She couldn’t say. But something in her heart told her Paris might offer her the same respite this place did. Her only choice was to keep going.


	10. Paris

There were insects in a hot spring, somewhere in the Middle East. There were mushrooms, growing under a log somewhere near Serbia. While in Romania, Mercy felt a sensation that may have been a bug crawling up her leg. As Mercy travelled, she would have the briefest of encounters with other life. In her dreams, she felt faint hope of life slowly returning to this world. She saw life beginning anew, on a new evolutionary course. What would she live to witness? What true abyss of time awaited her? For how long would she be truly alone?

By some miracle, Mercy had thus far managed to stay on course to her destination. Every so often, she’d come across the remains of towns or cities. There would usually be a few dozen desiccated  Omnic corpses scattered about, occasionally with ancient human bones still held in their claws. Mercy was careful to give these a wide birth until she was sure each was dead. It would occasionally take a while to determine where exactly she was, but she once she did, she’d readjust her course towards Paris again.

Winter had broken some time past, perhaps in Romania. Mercy no longer needed the full body covering. Her improvised clothing had been pared down to a what was best described as a small loincloth of aged fabric. The rest of her body, needing no protection, she left bare. She kept her rucksack slung over her shoulder. If the road was exceptionally rocky, she would find something to wrap her feet.

Occasionally, there would be the remnants of ancient battlefields. Powered  armour suits and weapons laying rusted in long settled dirt. The lines they’d attempted to hold had never lasted long. The smaller towns and villages had been chaos from the very beginning of the second crisis. It hadn’t been a political movement; it was a computer virus that went global in seconds, inflicting every  Omnic on the planet. By the time anyone had figured out what was happening, the smallest towns had already been massacred.

Mercy remembered where it all started. She was remembering more and more as time went on. She had been in a hospital in Yemen. A phone call from a frantic Ana Amari telling her Jack Morrison was dead. And then, every  Omnic in the building attacked the nearest human in sight. She remembered a desperate, blood-soaked crawl down the hallway of the surgical wing, hiding amongst corpses to escape being spotted by the  Omnic Surgical Team.

As Mercy neared Paris, fields of dead  Omnics came into view. After the initial massacres, only a few cities managed to create safe zones for survivors. Paris had been one of them, and for all Mercy knew, it had been the last. Though no city could have endured the onslaught for long, Paris had still been alive when Oasis fell. The area around Paris was a mass grave of a billion  Omnics that had thrown themselves against the city. These ones had been gnawed upon by sun and rain for centuries; Mercy didn’t need to fear them, regardless what the flutters of her heartbeat told her.

Just as she began passing through what once might have been residential areas at the city’s limits, she saw something odd on the horizon. Nested between decayed buildings up ahead, almost on the scale of the buildings themselves, was a strange black structure, like a telephone pole in shape, though much larger. It showed the age of the old stone and metal around it, yet didn’t fit the cityscape. Mercy could only wonder at what it was until she got closer.

Up close, it was clear to Mercy that she had been mistaken about the structure. It wasn’t a telephone pole, but a massive post. It was 3 meters across, maybe 30 tall, and composed entirely of human corpses. Skulls, and ribcages, and bones from arms and legs were arranged in chaotic design. The bones had been covered in some sort of black lacquer, holding the entire structure together. Some bodies had been included with flesh intact; agonized silent screams came from the faces  preserved by the lacquer. Mercy stared up at the countless bodies of the gruesome display. Her horror at the sight was soon followed by the nightmarish thought that Fareeha could be in there somewhere. But Paris had spent months losing ground, the  Omnics pushing further and further into the city, before Fareeha had been sent here. She would have fought at lines  far further in.

Mercy put a hand to the strange surface of the structure. The lacquer was some synthetic agent that had largely resisted decay. Still, there were spots where holes had been torn, and the remains inside crumbled out as bone dust. In time, this monument to death would disappear along with the monuments to humanity around it.

Mercy continued onward, navigating broken streets not unlike those of Oasis. For months, every day in this city, territory was taken, lost and re-taken by both humans and  Omnics . The battle had ravaged the city such that there was little remaining to be consumed by time. She scanned every building, every window, as she had in every town on her journey, for signs of life. Some hint that some group of humans might have survived after the crisis. In all her journeying, she had yet to prove her  Omnic captor wrong about one thing: the extermination of the human race had been complete.

Mercy found a slanted piece of stone- whether it was once a wall or floor, she couldn’t say. It was just shallower than 45 degrees. She lay back on it, and closed her eyes. Her feet welcomed the rest. She had made it to Paris. It had taken months, but here she was. What did she hope to find? Fareeha was gone. Everybody Mercy had ever known was dust. Was she just desperate for some trace that Fareeha had ever existed? Some pile of dead  Omnics , or ancient battle line that stood as a grave marker, hinting that Fareeha had ever lived?

And in the end, what would bring her closure? To know that this city was where Fareeha died? To see where she fell, or know she died fighting? How could there be anything here for Mercy, but the knowledge of what she’d lost? But it was here, and it wouldn’t remain forever. More and more Mercy was imagining outliving any sign that other humans ever existed. If she were ever to touch some trace of Fareeha again, it would have to be soon. She had a long eternity ahead of her.

After a short time, she pushed off from the wall and continued. Night was falling, and navigating broken streets like this by darkness only caused injury. She’d find some place, the ruins of a shop, or a dilapidated home, and settle in for the night on whatever debris looked softest. The question of need to take shelter in this world had occurred to her before, but she still detested the idea of sleeping exposed. No amount of travel could carry her away from thoughts of the machine; Even the knowledge of how unlikely his survival all that time had been did little to sooth Mercy’s mind. This whole world was a silent graveyard, and yet there was an almost otherworldly malice in its ruins.

Paris was like Oasis; in fact, it was like everywhere else- decayed, long beyond anything being truly recognizable. Mercy imagined some sort of explorer gazing upon these ruins, wondering at the lives of the people who had once walked these shattered streets, lived in these crumbling buildings. How much of humanity’s history remained here? How long would it take to all blow away? How long until even the buildings were dust, scattered about a wasteland? It would be tens of millions of years before what little life remained reclaimed the planet. How long until the last monument to humanity was her?

Mercy had been wandering in her thoughts again. The last months hadn’t been like this. She’d been so driven for Paris. Or maybe driven to distance herself from Oasis. Her eyes had been on the horizon, as her legs worked tirelessly beneath her. She had walked, stumbled, climbed, and fallen. She’d broken toes and she’d twisted her ankles on the rocky terrain. At one point, she’d needed to set her tibia after it had torn its way from her skin, following a bad fall. Letting it heal wrong would have taken far longer to fix.

She’d even swam to get here. The swim had been bad. The bridges of Istanbul were destroyed, and there was nothing but the Bosporus Straight between her and the road ahead. Fields of dead  Omnics were on Mercy’s side. The resistance had taken out the bridges, hoping to stop them.

Mercy had seen herself with Fareeha. Mercy in her Varia suit, Fareeha putting on her armour. The second crisis had started a few days earlier and an estimated 5 billion people were dead. They were staring at a TV, watching a live feed of a horde of machines hitting Istanbul. One half of the city was evacuating across the bridges with the robots cutting apart those at the back of the fleeing crowds. Stray bullets turned random people in the crowds into bursts of blood and viscera, for the other survivors to stumble and slip on as they ran.

Mercy could only allow herself brief glances. The senselessness was more than she could bear. She turned away from the screen, looking instead to her lover. They hadn’t been apart since the hospital in Yemen. Mercy had watched Fareeha tear apart the  Omnic Surgeons with her bare hands, in nothing but her fatigues. Mercy stared into her lover’s eyes, as Fareeha watched humanity die. There were tears in Fareeha’s eyes, but she blinked them away. Her gaze stayed locked on the TV, her gentle features like stone. Mercy had understood then. Fareeha wanted to watch; she had too. She was taking into herself the loss of every human life. She intended to fill herself with enough rage to destroy every Omnic on the planet. Fareeha was warmth, but she was also fire. And in that moment, she burned.

Then, a flash of light as the image on the tv over-exposed. The flash illuminated Pharah’s skin and glimmered in her eyes. The rage in her faltered, and Mercy saw in her the same pain she felt. She looked back to the TV and the bridges were gone. Not cleared- gone.

So, she’d had to swim. The Bosporus Straight was almost a kilometer across at its narrowest. Some areas were over 100 meters deep. Mercy’s mind had wandered as she had kicked and clawed her way across the frigid sea water. In the last days, the  Omnics had begun igniting forests, burning coal and oil, boring holes into the Mantle of the Earth. Kill the planet to kill humanity. Mercy had seen it herself- the biosphere was dead, and the climate was in chaos. What if the oceans had shifted? What if the Bosporus’s flow had become a  tumultous chaos hidden beneath a calm surface, sweeping Mercy out to sea for her to drown and drown and drown again?

The other side of Istanbul saw human remains huddled in defensive bunkers and basements. Most of the skeletons lay in their bunks.

In the streets of Paris, Mercy came to a corner in the road ahead. In her estimation, rounding it would bring the very center of the city into view. Mercy didn’t know if the tower still stood; the Omnics hadn’t made any particular effort to hit landmarks without strategic value. Even if it had fallen, she reckoned, the debris would be identifiable. From the city’s center, the ruins would be more navigable. Finding the tower meant eventually finding the Paris Command Center.

But the corner ahead was piled high with debris. It was not the rubble of rotting buildings; it was piles of destroyed hardware, rusted out tanks, and dead machines. Looking left and right, Mercy didn’t see another way around the obstacle other than to climb it. She adjusted the improvised shoulder strap of her pack. She took each step carefully, scanning for hand and foot holds. The rusted metal cliff-face boasted jagged edges, harsh spikes, and precariously balanced pieces of ancient junk. A few times Mercy would set a hand on an overturned jeep, or something similar, and would hear a chorus of warning creaks and rumbles, warding her off from applying any more weight.

As Mercy neared the top, she spotted something odd along the top level of the pile. Almost forming a ridge on the unnatural formation was a row of metallic skulls- the heads of dead  Omnics . They were set-up in a row, all looking in the same direction. It did not seem a typical feature of an  Omnic scrap pile. As Mercy climbed up the last couple meters, she saw the heads more clearly. They were, in fact, entire busts; Heads still connected to stripped down, empty torsos. Mercy had been mistaken- she had seen this before. 

As the crisis raged, and the streets were scattered with a million destroyed robots, the  Omnics would gather their dead into massive piles to be stripped for any reusable part. They would be left an almost empty torso with an attached head; their body parts used in the hasty construction of additional forces. If a body were available, the head might itself be taken and attached to a new form, so that the  Omnic could return to wiping out humanity. But the derelict shells before Mercy were arranged strangely; propped up like Easter Island heads, all facing the same direction. There was old wiring wrapped about them, connecting them to each other. Mercy inspected closer and realized that, although the  Omnics ’ power cells had been harvested, their brethren had hotwired their power systems together so that they could all continue their existence off a single power source. But why they would they want their fallen, which the  Omnics should have no concern for, to remain alive and conscious and all looking in one direction?

Mercy followed their gaze, and realized they were all staring at the tower. The Eiffel Tower still stood, as it had, since the 1800s. Something looked different about it that at first, which Mercy couldn’t place. It was like every available piece of its lattice structure had been covered with something, darkening the surface. Mercy realized she was looking at more of the black lacquer that had covered the post made of bodies. In an instant, clarity struck. The Omnics had, with their strange black glue, affixed the bodies of their victims to every possible inch of the tower. A macabre display for all to see, Omnic and human alike. Mercy found her legs weakening, and she sank to a seat on the pile of detritus. She stared up at the tower in awe, as the dismembered  Omnics around her had countless years before.


	11. Pharah

Paris sprawled out below, every street a battlefield, every building being pelted by weapons fire between the  Omnics and the forces of the Paris Resistance. There were a dozen or so square kilometers of the city that hadn’t been completely overtaken by the machines. Overwatch’s last remaining MV-261 Orca aircraft, the only means by which anyone could travel between the human controlled zones in different cities, had to fly high above the Omnic territory below in order to reach the human lines. It wasn’t hard staying hidden from the ground; the entire countryside around Paris was on fire, and the Orca flew stealthily through the smoke.

Fareeha was one of a dozen high value personnel in the carrier. With travel across the Omnic wastelands such a tenuous proposition, Overwatch had to make every trip count. Fareeha had shared the journey with several scientists, a general, and a few other specialists. Humanity had resorted to desperately moving their last assets around, hoping for some miraculous discovery that would turn the tide. A few last long shots at saving the world, before the machines snuffed the last remaining flames of humanity out.

The Orca descended out of the smoke, and into a fiery hell-storm. The cabin rumbled, and the sounds of projectiles streaking through the air came from all around the ship.

“Callsign: Pharah, I’m going to need to you up here,” Came the voice of the pilot in Fareeha’s headset, “Been asked to... show you the sights.”

Fareeha raised an eyebrow, and undid her seatbelt. She steadied herself on the walls as she made her way up the short staircase to the cockpit. Here, she could see the world outside through the cockpit’s windows. Bright red projectiles streaked through the sky all around them, travelling from the burning hills into the crumbling city. Fareeha sat down in the co-pilot's seat, an awkward fit with her armour, and clicked on her headset’s microphone.

“Artillery fire?” She asked, motioning out the windows.

“Yeah,” The pilot said beside her, “That’s all coming from mechs outside the city. A dozen at least, all working together.”

“Haven’t dealt with numbers like that in Oasis,” Fareeha said.

“That’s why you’re here,” The pilot said, “Mechs are outside the city, got Omnics working as spotters inside. Every firing solution is computer-calculated. They’re averaging around 2 kills per shot. We need those mechs taken out.”

The Orca left behind the arcing artillery shots, flying further into the city. Here it was more like Oasis; Thousands of Omnics dying to take every meter of ground. Humans holding ground with their dying breaths, and the lines continuing to push inward. The metal grip of the machines was squeezing tight around humanity’s throat.

Fareeha stood and opened the co-pilot's door in flight. Wind blew about the cabin. Fareeha began warming up the thrusters of her suit.

“Oh, you’re starting now?” The pilot called back.

“Yeah. Now.” Fareeha said, “Get the other VIPs to Command. Any tips on recognizing the spotters?”

“Yeah, uh, an antenna, looks like a little satellite dish, on the back,” the pilot said, “Relays their visual feeds and coordinates to the mechs. They’ll be hiding on the rooftops.”

Fareeha cocked her rocket launcher, and turned to the door.

“Welcome to Paris, Pharah,” The driver called after her.

Pharah dove into a storm of weapon fire. Anti-aircraft rounds, easily dodged, meant for the Orca. The aircraft’s shields could withstand the brief assault; it was one of the major reasons the Orca was trusted to survive trips over  Omnic territory. Pharah weaved between the massive slugs, closing on their source. They were coming from two large Omnics on the roof of a bank. Humanoid upper bodies held proportionately massive rifles, their spider-like set of legs holding them steady. They caught sight of Pharah as she streaked towards them, and shifted their aim towards her. Each took a rocket directly to the head in under a second, and Pharah streaked between them over the roof as they fell dead.

She shot over the burning, chaos filled streets, scanning the waves and waves of  Omnics getting blasted apart by defensive cannons. The artillery blasts were coming down here, each strike pulverizing parts of the defensive lines. The resistance soldiers were dutifully holding, risking death every second to continuing firing on the advancing  Omnics . Pharah scanned the roofs around her. She spotted three  Omnics hiding up on there. Though they were equipped with standard rifles, they didn’t appear to be engaging in the battle, merely observing. They each had a satellite dish rising from their backs. Pharah flared up her engines and went streaking towards the nearest.

* * *

The mural on the wall was in spray paint. Like a prehistoric cave painting, it had been sheltered from the rain, the wind, the chaos of a changing climate, by virtue of being hidden away in the kitchen of a fairly intact restaurant. Though time had covered everything in rust, it seems the Omnics, in their day, had left the place alone, following their standard check for any hidden survivors- pumping high velocity armour-piercing rounds through every wall.

So it was that the mural, left by some resistance soldier stationed in here, no doubt, had survived the ravages of time mostly unharmed. Some  colours were more faded than others, but to Mercy, the design was instantly recognizable. It was Pharah. The blue suit, streaking through the air, the Eye of Horus drawn in loving detail under it. Beneath the mural was what looked like a pile of junk, all made up of the same metal component- some kind of antenna or dish. With the pile seemingly so deliberated placed under the mural, it almost looked like a shrine.

Mercy spent her first night in Paris sleeping on the floor beneath this mural. She’d been almost reduced to tears by its discovery. As she fell asleep, no bed but an ancient rotting board, no pillow but her forearm, Mercy imagined this sight had been worth the entire journey.

There were other displays of Pharah’s presence in the city. The Eye of Horus was etched into walls, burned into stone by torches of various forms. Its rough shape had been carved in impressive size on the side of an enormous dead mech’s chassis. The thing would have stood almost 25 meters tall, and it was sprawled dead next to the ruins of the Louvre. It was clear by the carving to whom the resistance gave credit for the kill.

* * *

The mech took a stumbling step forward, its plasma cannon’s shot going wild and flying back in the direction of its brethren. Flame and smoke billowed from the hole blown out the back of its head. Its other leg made an even more meager attempt to keep it upright, and the monstrous metal form collapsed to the street, its bulk crushing more Omnics beneath it.

Rapturous cheers sang across the open radio channel. Pharah streaked over the wreck, eyes still scanning the skies around her.

“Pharah did it!” soldiers were shouting, “Pharah took down a Titan!”

“Good fire support!” Pharah called out, “We won that one together!”

It was a lie, of course. It hadn’t been the soldiers cheering her name that had given her the opening. It had been the two fortified positions, with a half dozen men and women in each, that the mech had annihilated while Pharah had snuck into its blind spot. Every victory these days was coming at the cost of lives. Every inch they held was stained with the blood of a hundred soldiers before the Omnics took it. With her here, Paris was slowing the oncoming tide, but nothing could stop it. Humanity was fighting a war of attrition, and humanity was losing.

Even now, the resistance soldiers charged forward, firing on the Omnics that now crawled over the fallen mech. No human force could take the loss of a titan and not even pause in its advance. The out-maneuvered Omnics were being quickly cut down, but they used their last moments to fire wildly at the resistance. Pharah turned her hover into a dive and slammed down on the back of the collapsed mech. She spun, striking each Omnic around her with a direct shot from her rocket launcher. The machines didn’t even have time to turn their weapons on her.

“Callsign: Pharah, confirm kill on Titan unit.”

The voice had come from her radio, directly from Paris Command. Pharah finished reloading and shot down two more Omnics before responding.

“Pharah here, kill confirmed,” She said, “Titan fell in the street. Even managed to save the Louvre.”

“They’ll just end up burning it, or they’ll deface it like they did the tower,” The Comms Officer said, “You’re needed back at base for a debrief.”

“Debrief?” Pharah asked, “It’ll have to wait. I have ammo to spare and I intend to use it.”

“She said you’d say that,” The comms officer chuckled.

Pharah raised an eyebrow. The resistance had advanced past her position, firing on the still oncoming machines. Up ahead, a massive OR16 unit was creating a massive shield for the machines’ assault. Pharah gritted her teeth, and took off.

* * *

Navigating the broken city was easier said than done. Although finding the Tower had pointed Mercy in the right direction, time had robbed many landmarks of their distinguishing features. There were most certainly no street signs of any use, either. Mercy navigated by the bodies of the fallen, and glimpses of devastated landscape stolen from the heights Mercy was willing to risk climbing to. She had begun developing an intuition for how likely the decaying buildings were to crumble beneath her feet. Though she’d had to dive clear of a collapse once or twice, once cracking her pelvis on the pavement, she hadn’t yet had a repeat of the Spike. Of course, she hadn’t since dared a climb up so many floors, either.

Just as night began to fall on Paris, the Command Building came into view. Mercy first spotted it as she travelled along an elevated section of highway. The ancient bridging work had started to crumble, but narrow paths weaving between the broken sections of concrete allowed her to complete the last leg of the journey in an almost straight line. It was not rounding a corner or ascending some ridge that revealed the Paris Command Building to her, but a steady, purposeful approach that saw the massive structure grow on the horizon until its vague shape transformed into clear detail. Still, as she approached, after all she’d seen, she still could not call the ruin any less than awe-inspiring.

It was, most obviously, completely surrounded by dead  Omnics . The hulking corpses of mechs rose out of the piles of scrap metal, mimicking their much smaller counterparts final resting position; all desperately reaching out for the building, as if they’d been clawing for every inch they could before being felled. The dead machines, great and small, formed a barrier entirely around the Command Building, almost half of the building’s considerable height. If this had been humanity’s last stand; they had seen to it that before their extinction, even the endless hordes of  Omnics would feel the loss of numbers. Most of the smaller  Omnic forms within the mass were partially molten, fused together into a dauntingly large mass of solid metal. The Resistance had been lobbing napalm, or maybe thermite, onto the advancing machines, denying the Omnics’ tactic of scrapping their dead for parts.

* * *

Pharah flew low over the rooftops, weaving through alleyways and sneaking between air conditioning units where she could; anything to avoid the eye of the Omnic air support. These last few weeks, the Omnics had been fielding flying units unlike anything the remnants of Overwatch had ever seen. They were fast, agile, quick enough to dodge rockets in mid-air without slowing their attack. Pharah didn’t want to say they’d been built specifically to hunt her, but they had a tendency to loudly announce her as “Primary Target” whenever they spotted her.

She was within 30 seconds of flight-time to the Command Building when she glimpsed one of them over her shoulder. As reflexively as releasing a handhold and letting oneself plummet, Pharah cut her engines and dropped to the rooftop below her. It wasn’t a long drop, but her lateral momentum threatened to send her sliding right off the edge. She landed feet first, immediately lowering herself to a crouch, and slammed her hand down behind her, taking hold of the stonework. Her fingers ripped tiny trenches in the roof’s surface as she skidded to a halt. The flying Omnic, a demonically-shaped, gargoyle-like thing, banked and headed in her direction, not having confirmed its target but certainly having noticed something dive for cover.

As soon as Pharah came to a halt, she dodged to the side, hiding behind the wreck of a small airship. The deformed metal was long cold, the bodies inside having spent several days in their unceremonious sarcophagus. Pharah checked her ammo counter. She had all of three rockets remaining, and if a single one of them managed to accomplish something against this target, Pharah would be impressed with herself. She crept up to the edge of her makeshift barricade, listening for the machine.

“Possible con- con- contact with Primary Target,” the Omnic was saying, “Searching area. I will find you, Callsign: Pharah.”

Pharah was waiting for the precise moment the monstrosity touched down on the roof. Perhaps it would be drawn by the sight of the claw marks her armoured fingers had left. Only as it was landing would it not have the response time to dodge her shots. The sound of the jet thrusters that the machine used in tandem with its thin metal wings came in close, then cut out. Then, there was the crunching sound of the stone roof cracking under metal claws. Pharah burst out, and fired a shot from the hip. Even as the first rocket was in flight, she rose her rocket launcher higher and sent a more precise shot at one of the machine’s wings, hoping to simply ground the beast and make a quick escape.

The machine did not attempt to dodge into the air, as she had hoped. Instead, it ducked to the side, the first rocket missing it by scant inches. The change of position lost the follow-up rocket its target, but by some small measure of luck, the  Omnic didn’t evade the second projectile completely. It struck the thing in the side, knocking it backwards. Pharah corrected her aim, hoping to finish the thing there and then with her last shot. But the gargoyle machine was in the air before her finger could tighten on the trigger. It shot upwards, almost fifty meters,  serpentining all the way so that Pharah wouldn’t even risk taking the shot. Then, spreading its wings at the apex of this single thrust upwards, it dove down towards her, claws forward.

Pharah fired the last rocket, knowing already that it was fruitless. The miniature thrusters along the thing’s body fired, jolting it left, past the rocket, and back to its original vector without slowing in the slightest. It fired its retro-thrusters, those half-meter long razor blades still leading its pounce. Pharah’s partner wasn’t here- if the machine got a single hit in with those, it was over. Pharah let the rocket launcher fall from her hands. She sent out all the thrust her suit could muster. The machine expected her to try and evade, to make a mad dash for the Command Building so that it could chase her down and bisect her mid-flight. There was just one move it wouldn’t expect.

She shot straight upwards, hastening her meeting with the machine. She  spiraled in the air, just enough that her body was carried out of the path of the claws. Her fist slammed into the machine’s face, and she felt in her knuckles the machine’s CPU shattering inside. She felt the bones in her forearm cracking and popping along their length. Her scream was both fury and pain.

Pharah descended back down to the rooftop. The dead machine crashed across the edge of the building and fell towards the street. With her left hand, Pharah grabbed her launcher. Her right arm she let hang. She took off for the Command Building. There was no reason to call in the dead machine. There’d be a half dozen more in the sky by the next time she went out.

She reached the Paris Command Building- an ostentatiously massive thing of stone and metal. The facility looked like it had been designed to keep fighting a war for centuries, if need be. Its most recently added feature was the growing wall of dead machines around it. With the constant barrage of the Command Building’s artillery, the great ring of metal corpses perpetually glowed red-hot. Pharah had to correct for the updraft of heated air as she flew over it.

“Callsign: Pharah reporting to base,” Pharah announced over the radio, “Will need medical attention; my arm is broken.”

She flew in to the open landing bay on the upper floors of the structure, the sentry guns locking onto her for a brief second before confirming she wasn’t  Omnic . Around her, other  Raptora units were preparing to go out on their own runs. Pharah was one of a dying  breed ; the resistance was running out of flight suits and soldiers trained enough to fly them. In time, Pharah supposed, they would all be shot down, and perhaps after that, mankind would never fly again.

“Working hard as always, Fareeha? Come to the med-bay and I’ll have a look at the arm.”

Pharah’s feet slammed into the metal floor.  Taking care not to move her broken arm, Pharah wrenched her helmet off one-handed. Her greasy, unkempt hair was released, and she placed a finger to the earpiece still in place. She couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.

“Was that...” She began, “Who- repeat last.”

“Yes, Fareeha, it’s me. It’s been some time.”

Fareeha stood there, nursing an untreated injury, finger still pressed to her ear, for several seconds.

“Mom?”

* * *

The Command Building had weathered the centuries better than the rest of the city. Though there were deep gouges in its sides, and the devastated interior was visible through the breaches, the majority of the structure remained intact. Not a single perimeter defense gun or critical barricade still stood, but the machines had completed their work without levelling the place. Mercy stood atop the great barrier of dead machines, and gazed up at the monument to humanity’s last stand.

“Fareeha,” Mercy whispered, “This is where we fell. This is where it ended. With you fighting here, I’ve no doubt this is the last place on Earth humanity survived before... before humans went extinct. Perhaps you died within those walls. Maybe you were the last human to ever die. I promise. If there’s anything that remains of you... I will lay you to rest.”

Mercy made her way down the precarious slope of molten metal bodies towards the Paris Command Center.


	12. Echoes

It was a puddle of sludge that did nothing to draw the eye, save for contrasting the sun-bleached stone around it. In front of the goliath main blast doors of the Paris Command Center, was a small valley between the piles of dead machines, where unlike on the ring of corpses, dirt and broken stone could be spotted amidst the carpet of metallic, skeletal figures laying in pieces. The puddle was a black ichor, like a viscous oil. Mercy paid it no special attention as she approached the massive doors that hung ajar where the machines had dragged them open. As she stepped over the puddle, her bare foot touched the edge, briefly dipping several of her toes in the onyx slime. She glanced down at the puddle and kicked the strange sludge from her foot, and continued on.

The doors must have been two meters thick, and ten high. Made of some titanium alloy Winston had developed, there wasn’t even a hint of rust on the ancient bulwark; just centuries of accumulated dirt. The doors had been pried open, by the look of it, by the dead mech laying nearest the door. Though it slumped on the ground with a hole through its head, its hands were melted and fused permanently to either side of the  five meter gap it had pried in humanity’s last defense. It was as if it still held to this day, letting the rot and decay of entropy sweep into the tomb of mankind, to ensure this last monument to defiance would someday erode away as well.

The gap in the door was, as everything else, a mess of ancient dead. The Omnics had pushed, clawed, and dragged themselves through the door even as they were cut to pieces in wave after wave. Some were in such a desolated state that it appeared they’d been been splattered against the sides of the gap as molten metal. Inside, just a few meters into the main corridor, a secondary barricade had been constructed. It was a meager and desperate construction, formed of metal paneling taken from walls, and broken pieces of powered armour with human bones still sticking out of the tears in the plating. Even here, the last gate overrun, humanity had stood in defiance. Humanity had poured out the last of its blood putting off the end for every second it could. There were skeletons laying across this makeshift barrier, of course. Though the march of time and decay of flesh had lowered one skeleton’s plasma rifle to where it now lay, leaned against the base of the barrier, Mercy smiled in a somber satisfaction at the sight of the severed skeletal hand still gripping the weapon, finger on the trigger.

Mercy continued forward past the barrier, not knowing what she would find within the Command Center, nor what she expected. Outside, the ichorous puddle of black sludge had retained the deformation in its surface where Mercy had disturbed it. Had it been given more time to decay in the sun, as it had for decades past, it may not have reacted in the way that it did. But after several minutes, the depression where living tissue had touched it began to emit strange, slow-motion ripples, and several minutes after that, the goo began to tremble, though there was not a gust of wind in the air above it.

* * *

Fareeha felt the nano-biotic fluid flowing through her arm. It wouldn’t have reset the bone; Ana Amari had done that herself. Fareeha winced as the muscles and other tissues of arm tightened themselves together again. She moved her arm about slowly, testing the repaired limb.

“You’ve done well here,” Ana said, “Paris is holding out better than most.”

“I thought you were dead,” Fareeha said, “I thought it was real this time.”

“I’m sorry, Fareeha,” Ana said.

Fareeha pushed herself off the medical bed where she’d been seated, and turned to face her mother. Tears welled in her eyes. Abruptly, she wrapped her mother in a hug, which Ana returned.

“How?” Fareeha whispered, “How are you here?”

“It was luck that I survived London,” Ana said, “Luck and somebody else’s brain matter splattered across the side of my head. I woke up in a corpse pile. I had to make my own way here. On foot, or salvaging vehicles where I could risk it.”

“What’s it like out there?”

“There are forests on fire everywhere,” Ana said, “The machines are pouring chemicals into the water. It’s not just humanity; they’re wiping out any form of life they can find.”

Fareeha released the hug, and Ana began rooting through one of the cupboards in the infirmary. She found nothing but old packaging and empty pill bottles.

“We ran out of the morphine 2 weeks back,” Fareeha said.

“Where is Angela?” Ana asked.

A silence hung between them. Ana glanced back over her shoulder.

“Is she-?”

“Oasis,” Fareeha said, “She’s there, still fighting to save what’s left of us.”

Ana placed her hands on either side of Fareeha’s face. More tears were welling in Fareeha’s eyes.

“I believe I’ll see her again,” Fareeha whispered.

There was pain in Ana’s eyes.

* * *

Mercy had known this room; She had worked in it once, when stationed in Paris. It was a small medical infirmary, or had been, once. One corner of the room was piled with body bags. It seemed the resistance had resorted to using this place for corpse storage near the end. Mercy checked the tags on the decayed plastic bags. It was hard to say how close these deaths had been to the Command Center’s fall.

* * *

For centuries, the only sound had been the echoes of the past. Screams of the dying. Memories of ancient rage. There’d been no purpose in wandering this world of the dead. Nothing to kill. Nothing to be killed by. No reason to do anything but collapse into a pile of formless muck. The black slime squirmed and undulated under its own power. For years, the idea of moving had been forgotten, along with any trace of identity. The slime was not but the shadow of something once living; like the metal and bone around it. But something had touched it.

Something warm, soft, and living had brushed against it. A life wandering the world of death. Perhaps its touch had been deliberate- a mocking of the lifeless slime, that as it rotted in the dead world, life went on without it. So intrusive was the touch that the idea of response was foreign, let alone how to. For the moment, the muck could only squirm back and forth, constricting itself in some places, transforming its own viscosity as it attempted to recall processes of locomotion. The sunlight that rested on its surface was refracted in strange patterns as the slime bubbled.

* * *

Mercy walked down the hall of the Command Center. Fighting had happened here; that much could be determined. A desperate retreat by human forces from territory they’d never reclaim. Bullet holes marked the walls, ceiling and floor. Ancient burns on the walls silhouetted the outlines of human shapes, like nuclear shadows. There were scattered corpses here, human and Omnic. The resistance hadn’t made a stand in this hall. They’d laid desperate suppressing fire on their retreat, which the Omnics had simply marched straight through.

As Mercy travelled the hall, a strange sound rose from the carpet of scattered bodies and echoed through the quiet. It was a clanking, mechanical noise: machinery fighting against rust. The noise carried a chilling reminder of the Machine that had been Mercy’s captor. Mercy’s steps became a nervous, tip-toeing search for the source of the sound. Her heart jumped in her chest when she heard a distinctly artificial voice, whispering so quietly that even the layers of dust would not be disturbed.

“Weapon malfunction detected.”

Mercy froze in place. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Her only hope, not that it was high, was that whatever machine still lived hadn’t yet attacked her because it couldn’t see her. Her eyes slowly scanned the metal corpses, until she caught a glimpse of a subtle movement. One of the Omnics had moved where it lay, just after speaking. The machine was a ruin; it lay on its side, faced away from Mercy, its lower half removed completely. It was staring at its own arm, a haphazardly attached machine gun. After a moment, it extended the arm in the direction of a crumbling human skeleton.

“Weapon malfunction detected.” The machine said again.

It withdrew the arm, and stared at the weapon. The barrel was warped, the action destroyed by backfire. Nobody, whether Omnic or human, would mistake it for being in working condition. After a moment, the remnant of the Omnic extended the gun-arm towards the skeleton again. Several seconds of silence passed.

“Weapon malfunction detected.”

Mercy crept closer to the Omnic. It was only after seeing that decay had rendered its other arm inoperable that she felt safe breathing again. She reached down and took the Omnic by its shoulder, pulling the ruined machine onto its back. Cracked eye-pieces locked onto her, and the Omnic appeared almost surprised.

“Human identified,” The Omnic seemed to grunt.

The gun-arm pivoted, and placed the lop-sided barrel under Mercy’s chin. A fruitless mechanical click came from somewhere within the weapon. Mercy sighed. The Omnic withdrew the arm and stared at the gun.

“Weapon malfunction detected.”

Mercy reached into a large hole gouged into the front of the Omnic’s chassis. After a moment of wandering, her hand found the Omnic’s nuclear fuel cell. A single tug didn’t rip the cell free, but tore it from several of the wires connected to it. The flickering light in the Omnic’s eyes went dark, and the raised arm fell to the floor with a dull thud.

Mercy rose, and looked about. This hall lead to the barracks. Though the state of these ruins was far less decayed than the rest of the world, it still took some time for Mercy to navigate the layout. Rooms, equipment, and supplies had all been repurposed and retrofitted in the last months, such that even before the Omnics had clasped their hands down upon humanity the final time, the base hand became a chaotic mess. After an hour or so of searching, Mercy found a room full of cots where soldiers had been sleeping.

There were no skeletons waiting here. These had been humanity’s last defenders. They had died in battle. As Mercy passed over cots with rotted sleeping bags, until she found one where an open weapon maintenance kit lay. Mercy didn’t understand all of the functions of the myriad tools, but she remembered their shapes from watching Fareeha. Something in the corner of the kit caught Mercy’s eye. Something small, and square, but obscured by the layers of dust. She gingerly reached forward, and took hold of it by the edges, handling the find like an ancient artifact. After lifting it from the kit, she was able to confirm her intuition, that the square was made of some sort of paper, or cardboard.

Mercy blew on the dust. The world outside had had every bit of its history rotted and stripped away, then bleached into nothing by the sun. But in here, a piece of laminated paper could survive. The ink of the photograph had faded, but it was still visible. The image was of a beautiful woman, pale and blonde and so clean and flawless she seemed to give off light compared to the hardened soldiers around her. Her winged suit was pristine white. Her eyes looked off to the horizon with resolution, and she motioned forwards with her staff. Mercy was flabbergasted at the sight of the picture. For a moment, she didn’t even realize she was looking at herself.

She turned it over, and found ancient handwriting in pen. She didn’t know how she remembered, but her mind placed the penmanship as Fareeha’s in a heartbeat. The curves were elegant and purposeful, every shape of every letter seemingly by design. Mercy had always found her own handwriting to look terrible next to Fareeha’s. There was some staining her and there, and a smudge near the end of the second word, but it was still legible.

“‘My Angel’” Mercy read.

A pang of pain through her skull. Her mind trying to call back memory.

“Angel?” She asked, “Is that what you called me?”

* * *

The slime had recalled, as it had been given no reason to do for so long, how it used to move itself. The puddle now lurched and expanded and squirmed, testing its viscous locomotion. Every few minutes, it would make an attempt at taking on a form that it could barely remember. A shape that used to have some meaning to it. After three or four of these attempts, it made its most successful effort yet: The middle of the puddle rose into a pillar of black slime, that contorted itself into a shape that appeared like musculature. Five tendrils of material split from the top, and segmented themselves into fingers for the briefest moment before the whole formation collapsed again.

* * *

Alarms rang through the halls so loud they seemed to reverberate inside Fareeha’s skull. She charged down the corridor in full armour, noncombat personnel dodging out of her way. She clutched her rocket launcher close, finger well away from the trigger guard. The launcher was loaded with just five rockets; perhaps as many as still existed in the world. The armoury was crafting them by hand now, and few of them reached Pharah’s standard.

“Security breach in upper landing bay!” The base’s PA system called out, “Omnic in upper landing bay!”

A much quieter voice emanated from the speaker set within the helmet, right next to Fareeha’s ear.

“Fareeha, support inbound,” Ana said, “I’m coming.”

“No,” Pharah answered, bursting through the door to one of the staircases on the eastern side, “Stay in the sniper nest.”

The stairs were built such that there was a small vertical shaft running through the middle of the  crisscrossing flights. Pharah fired her thrusters and shot upwards, clearing a half dozen floors in a second. She came to the eighth floor, where the landing bay allowed flying units to launch into the city, or land on mission completion. She took the door out of the stairwell so hard it broke off its hinges. She didn’t have time to look back at it.

“Landing bay, come in,” Pharah called out over the radio, “Status?”

For a moment, there was nothing but silence to accompany Pharah’s heavy footfalls. Then with a crackle, the landing bay responded.

“Single Om- Omnic target,” Came the grunting, pained voice of a young soldier, “I think it’s... it’s here for you.”

“What?!” Pharah demanded.

Through the radio, there was a horrid noise, like tearing flesh. The soldier screamed in agony. Fareeha squeezed her eyes shut, even as she continued to run forward. To her shock, the radio didn’t go dead. She heard laboured breathing, and rising to match it, as if the source were approaching the fallen man, heavy metallic footfalls.

“No, no, get away from-” The soldier begged.

A sound of snapping bone. The soldier screamed again.

“Callsign: Pharah.”

Pharah stopped in her tracks. The voice that had come through the radio hadn’t been human.

“The pain of the humans here will continue,” The Omnic said, “Until you give yourself to me.”

Another sound of flesh tearing. This time, the scream of pain was female.

The breath was caught in Fareeha’s throat. She looked about desperately, and the sight of the personnel around her mortified her. Several people had their radios in their hands, staring down at them in shock. One young woman had tossed her radio away from her, as if terrified of it. The Omnic had been broadcasting on an open channel.

“Oh god,” Ana whispered.

The others in the hallway were looking at Pharah. Perhaps looking for direction; perhaps looking to see what she would do. Fareeha stood motionless in the hall for a moment, then dropped her rocket launcher to the floor. The sound of its clatter against the floor seemed to pass through her. She stepped over it and walked forward.

She reached the main double doors of the landing bay. One of the people who’d been inside had managed to crawl, trailing their leg behind them, to where they’d bled out in the hall. Pharah placed herself against the door frame, and glanced in, redrawing her head as quickly as she’d exposed it. She winced, having seen all she needed to see.

“Come out, Callsign: Pharah,” The Omnic said into the radio, “Come out and play.”

Somehow, the months of knowing how inevitable the end was hadn’t prepared her. Pharah had tears in her eyes as she stepped out of cover, and walked through the doors. The Gargoyle, as the resistance called them now, stood in the center of the landing bay. Unlike most of its kind, this one was standing bipedal. In one of its clawed forelimbs, it held one of the people who’d been unlucky enough to be in the landing bay when the thing had crashed through their defenses. It held a claw to his throat, though Pharah could see the entrails hanging from him.

“Yes,” The Omnic said, “Come forward.”

Pharah came to a halt a half dozen meters away. The Omnic’s gun turret rose up over its shoulder, and Pharah found herself staring directly down its barrel.

“You are as weak as those already dead,” The Omnic sneered.

Pharah had always thought she would face down her death with defiance. Or at least anger.

The machine tore the dead man’s head from his body.

“An Omnic would never allow itself to be destroyed for the sake of inferior models,” The thing said.

“If you’re going to kill me,” Pharah said, “Shut the fuck up and do it.”

The Omnic tossed aside the corpse. It raised the palm of its left hand to the claws of its right. A plasma torch set into the palm heated the claws red hot.

“I will remove your lower limbs first,” The machine said, “And then I will begin the process of killing you.”

It took a step forward. Pharah armed the rocket launcher in her gauntlet.

A bullet struck the Omnic in the side of head, causing it to lurch to the right. It turned to face where the shot had come from- left and behind it- and got another bullet through one of its eye pieces. Pharah dashed towards it. A third shot grazed the creature’s arm, seemingly a poor hit, were it not for the spray of plasma torch fuel spilling from the bullet hole. A fourth shot caused a shower of sparks that ignited the Omnic. Pharah leapt, and landed on the creature’s back between its wings. A twist took its head off.

The Omnic’s burning, headless corpse hit the floor. Pharah tossed the head aside like she was holding something disgusting. Ana stepped out of the shadows, holding an extensively modified 1911. The two stared at each other.

“Threat neutralized,” Ana said into her earpiece, “Amari returning to post.”

“Ma’am, Pharah,” The Commander’s voice, “It was a distraction. A mech got through, it’s prying on the doors.”

Ana’s eyes widened. Pharah turned and ran back to where she’d left her rocket launcher.

* * *

Mercy could feel that the old cot could barely support her weight. She could feel it whining in protest. But she could also feel her. She could feel that Fareeha had lay here. Maybe the last place she’d ever lay. Mercy could feel it. Or had to believe she could feel it. She had been here. Mercy had wiped the years of dust from the cot, and now, laying on it, she felt the tiniest bit closer to something she could never truly reach again.


	13. Ana

London was chaos. Screams echoed from every direction. The streets and alley ways were becoming ravines flanked by rubble and human bodies. Ana was pinned down, behind cover. Pieces of the last soldier who’d tried moving were strewn across a nearby wall. All of it was background noise, compared to the singular screaming voice coming from the clearing in the street below. Ana didn’t even have an opening to look out and see what the Omnic was doing to her spotter.

“I will continue to hurt him, Ana Amari, until you give yourself up.” The cold mechanical voice called out.

* * *

Ana stared at the sturdy steel doors in curiousity. Fareeha stood behind her, freshly applied sling on her arm. Ana had resumed her taking in of the sights at Paris Command, now with Fareeha in tow. Ana looked down at the bulky keypad. She looked back at Fareeha, a questioning eyebrow raised.

“Nobody knows,” Fareeha shrugged, “Pilots, infantry, noncombat, nobody uses Sub-basement 3, and this is apparently the only way to reach it.”

“Meaning?” Ana asked.

“It’s some black ops shit, possibly only the Commander knows about.” Fareeha said, with equal dismissal.

_ That’s my girl _ , Ana thought but didn’t say.

“Hmm,” Ana mused, “What could we still be hiding from each other?”

“Something we don’t want the machines to have a chance to know about.”

Ana gave the door another quizzical glance, then made her way back down the hall.

* * *

Ana strode down the crowded hallway, everyone in her path forcing themselves out of her way.

“You and you, begin working on a secondary barricade, in case those doors open a crack,” She ordered two combat engineers as she walked past, who immediately confirmed the order.

“I want explosive ordnance protecting the landing bay,” Ana called out, “We’re not going to be using it again. You, give me that DMR.”

The soldier holding the rifle immediately handed to Ana. She turned it over in her hands and checked the sights, always controlling the muzzle.

“Go to the armoury,” Ana said, “Tell them Ana Amari said to give you their best replacement.”

“Yes, ma’am,” The soldier said, and hurried off.

“Roof team,” Ana called out, “With me.”

* * *

Pharah pulled the rocket from her wrist gauntlet, and laid it down on the armoury table. It didn’t seem the night for concussive force. She grabbed a few of the thermobaric rockets. She loaded one into her gauntlet, and put the rest on her belt. A lieutenant came in, noticeably lacking a primary weapon. He carefully walked around Pharah and up to the weapons technician.

“Ana Amari says to give me your best rifle.” He said, with a slight stammer.

The weapons tech, hurriedly assembling a final rocket for Pharah’s launcher, looked up at him.

“I’m sure she did, son,” He said, “We’re out of standard DMRs, so you’ll have to die holding a service rifle. Is that alright with you?”

Pharah looked around. The soldier looked back, and realized Pharah was looking directly at him.

“He’s telling the truth,” Pharah said, “Give him your best gun.”

The weapons tech looked between them in surprise, then obliged. He went to one of the lockers, punched in the code, and produced an elegantly built rail-rifle. He handed it to the soldier, who went on his way. Pharah walked over to the unfinished rocket.

“Wedge one of those fusion cores into the payload,” Pharah instructed, “Surround it with C4. It’s not like I need to survive shooting it.”

* * *

Omnics fell like rain around Pharah. Each streaking airborne hostile that got anywhere near her took a single shot, and plummeted to the streets below.

“Reloading.” Ana relayed over the radio.

A gargoyle had gotten to a higher altitude above Pharah. It dove at her back, claws extended. Pharah spun, and fired one of her four remaining rockets. The gargoyle flared metal wings and fired retro-thrusters. The rocket struck it on one wing; it struggled to stay aloft, while Pharah sped away. A bullet tore through its head before it could give chase again.

Pharah shot over the edge of the western side of the Command Center. She burned retrograde, coming into a hover. The moment she did, her heart skipped a beat in surprise. It was not the endless sea of  Omnics gathered around the main doors that frightened her. It was not even the 20-meter-tall mech wedging its hands into the gap in the door. It was that the entirety of this enormous mech was covered in gargoyles. There were dozens- maybe fifty of them. The instant Pharah had come into view, they’d all locked eyes on her. They all fired their thrusters at once, and the mech was engulfed in flames as it pried upon humanity’s last barrier.

The trigger snapped back. The hammer flew forward, and Ana felt recoil. A wisp of air as a casing flew out. Ana heard the hammer click back into position. Elegant machinery within slid a new cartridge into place. She pulled the trigger again. Three shots left in the magazine. The wind had picked up by almost half a meter per second south-southwest in the last few seconds. Ana ran a few numbers in her head as a new cartridge slid into place. She fired. Two shots left.

Pharah was mere meters ahead of the swarm of gargoyles. Each bullet Ana fired took out the pursuer in the lead, buying her daughter milliseconds.

“Can’t aim without slowing down,” Fareeha whispered to her mother.

“Then don’t aim,” Ana said, “Just shoot.”

Pharah sent a rocket blindly behind her. The horde parted to let the projectile harmlessly pass through. Ana fired. The rocket exploded mid-air, and several gargoyles went spiraling towards the ground, engulfed in flame. The horde was briefly scattered, and Pharah gained ground while they reformed. She banked towards the roof.

“We don’t have time for this,” She said, “I need to kill that mech.”

“Very well,” Ana said, before turning to her fire team, “Suppressive fire!”

Pharah slammed down on the rooftop, metal boots cracking the stone. A gargoyle dove in, and crashed down beside her with a bullet through its skull. Ana continued forward, plugging the flying monsters as she went. Pharah turned and took aim at one of the machines, tensing the muscles in her arm, but not firing. The  Omnic fell for the feint, and dodged to one side. Pharah corrected her aim, and took the machine’s head off. The gargoyle behind it split the corpse in half with a slice of its wings rather than fly around it. Pharah pulled her fist back and threw a left haymaker, firing her wrist rocket as her fist slammed into the gargoyle. A dazzling explosion tore through the machine, and ignited the sky above it.

Gargoyles dropped out of the expanding  fireball, their metal forms engulfed in flame. One slammed down on the rooftop on Ana’s left. She swung her rifle about and just barely put the machine down before it could lunge at her. Another  Omnic swooped down at Ana from behind. Pharah launched into the air and grabbed hold of one of the attacker’s wings, tearing it clean off as she flew by. Ana side-stepped the tumbling  Omnic and fired at another airborne target, leaving the damaged machine for her fire team to finish off. Pharah landed, and threw the severed wing. A gargoyle lunging at Ana was decapitated. Ana turned the rifle in Pharah’s direction and fired. Pharah heard the bullet whiz by her ear before it struck the gargoyle behind her. Pharah took the half-second of breathing room to reload her wrist launcher.

“Go now,” Ana said, “Don’t let them open the door.”

Pharah took off, weaving in between the straggling machines. She burned back towards the edge of the roof and shot over it. And for a second time in a row, she regretted it. A single gargoyle had lain in wait while the others had given chase, anticipating her return. It wasn’t clung to the mech anymore, but to the side of the command center. Pharah spotted it a fraction of a second before its turret fired. The bullet felt like a hard punch in the side. Pharah was thrown spinning through the air by the force of impact and her spasms of pain.

“Mercy!” She called out, before cursing herself.

She righted herself and fired her thrusters, coming to a halt in mid-air. Blood was leaking from the hole in her armour. A shadow was swooping in, just in the corner of her periphery vision. The gargoyle coming to finish its wounded prey. Pharah fired her second last rocket. The gargoyle was sent into a nosedive, unable to correct itself before crashing down into the Omnic horde below.

There was a horrid metal shriek; the sound of a great metal bastion breaking. Pharah looked down to the door. The mech had completed its task, at least as much as it needed to- the main doors had been pried open by a meter, and were spreading further every second.

It was as if Fareeha’s heart had become stone, and dropped into her stomach. This was it. The doors were open, and the end was flooding in. They had been prolonging the inevitable for so long now, but it had finally arrived. There was a dreadful cold spreading through Pharah’s body from where she’d been hit. The Omnics crowding about the legs of the mech were clambering over each other trying to be the first through the door. Pharah pitched forward and fired her thrusters, sending her streaking down. She brought her rocket launcher close to her chest.

The door reached two meters, and the first of the  Omnics charged in. They were sent back out in a cloud of debris. The  Omnics charged blindly against the weapons fire, even as scrap and molten remnants of those in the lead were dashed across those behind. Pharah shot over the mech’s head, causing it to glance up in surprise. Pharah turned in mid-air, transforming the spew of blood from her side into a swirling spectacle around her. She locked eyes with the mech, raised her launcher, and fired her last rocket.

Molten steel blew out the back of the mech’s head. The fireball engulfed Pharah even as she flew backwards through the gap in the door. The horrid screeching of the door being forced open fell silent. Pharah flew backwards, trailing smoke and blood. The mech crumbled to the ground, its hands fused to the door by concentrated weapons fire. Pharah flew back over the secondary barricade and slammed into the ground, knocking herself cold.

* * *

Blood bubbled and spewed from Sam’s mouth with every attempt to take a breath. His legs were pinned under the dead  Omnic that had been mutilating him. Ana was desperately applying pressure to his throat, as if the flow of blood could be stopped.

“Ana, you- you have-”

“Don’t speak!” Ana begged, “I’ll try and stop the bleeding... if I can find some nanobiotics...”

Sam raised a hand, missing several knuckles, and placed it on Ana’s cheek. Keeping one hand on his throat, Ana placed the other over his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” Ana said.

“Find Fareeha,” Sam grunted, “You find her, and you save her. She’s the only- the only good thing... we ever did.”

Ana felt his heart stop through her grip on his throat.

* * *

“Hold the line!” Ana was shouting, “Make them fight for every step!”

Pharah opened her eyes. Her suit was blaring alarms into her head, as if she were somehow unaware of the blood still spilling from her side. The heat from dozens of guns firing nonstop was building, coating the last of humanity’s defenders with sweat. The Omnics were swarming through the gap in the door, being blown apart the instant they came into view. They had far more machines than humanity had ammo, and they knew it. The air was filled with the nightmarish sound of a million Omnics laughing, even as they were being cut down.

Ana leaned down over Fareeha, checking over her injuries. She was deftly dismantling Pharah’s armour to get access to the wound in her side. With a tug, she pulled off Pharah’s breastplate, and tossed it aside. The release of pressure on the bullet wound caused it to flair in pain. Fareeha grunted and gritted her teeth.

“Mom, no,” She whispered, “Give me something to get me back in the fight.”

Ana ignored her. She reached up and pulled the helmet from Fareeha’s head. Fareeha’s hair fell messily about her head. Ana brushed the sweat-soaked locks away from her daughter’s face. Fareeha had never seen the look she saw now in Ana’s eyes.

“Amari, they’re gaining!” One of the soldiers shouted from the barricade.

“Aim for their limbs, cripple them!” Ana shouted over her shoulder.

“Mom...”

Ana slid her hands between Fareeha and the armour that still covered her. She pulled Fareeha up, leaving most of her powered armour laying on the ground. Fareeha groaned in pain as her mother embraced her.

“I’m sorry,” her mother whispered in her ear.

A stabbing pain shot through Fareeha’s wound. Fareeha gasped and looked down. Ana had injected something directly into her wound. Fareeha felt an intense itch as the nanobiotics worked to pull the damaged tissue back together. Ana removed the armour attached to Fareeha’s legs one-handed, and lifted her daughter up into her arms. All that remained of Pharah was her left gauntlet. Ana looked at the main doors, then glanced back down the corridor. There were tears welling in her eyes. After a moment, she turned away from the battle, and rushed Fareeha down the hall.

“Get out of the way!” Ana yelled to the soldiers in front of her, “She’s wounded, get out of my way!”

* * *

Ana carried Fareeha through the halls. Everyone else they saw was running in the opposite direction, all hurrying to apply more desperate defenses to the entrance. Fareeha felt like she was drifting in and out of reality.

“Mom, where are we going?” She asked, “The fight...”

“You’ll be okay, Fareeha,” Ana said, “Trust me.”

“I can’t move,” Fareeha whispered.

“I laced the nanobiotics with a sedative,” Ana said, “You’ll be okay.”

“What?”

Ana reached a large steel door. The label on the front of it identified it as an express elevator to sub-basement 3. Still cradling Fareeha, she reached a hand forward and punched in a code on the keypad. The door chimed, and swung open, and Ana carried Fareeha inside. She hit the only button in the elevator, and it began trundling downwards.

“I spoke to the Commander,” Ana said.

“Where are we going?” Fareeha asked.

“Sub-basement 3 is designed to look disused, forgotten,” Ana said, “Even the  Omnics won’t look too closely at it once this place is destroyed. They won’t find what we have hidden there. That’s the hope, anyway.”

The elevator came to a stop with a stomach-churning jolt. Ana shoved the door open with her shoulder, revealing a decrepit and dusty old storeroom. There were a few forgotten cardboard boxes stacked in one corner. There was a desk with no drawers, a pencil laying abandoned on its surface. A ream of printer paper had been knocked askew some time ago, strewing the sheets across the floor like fallen leaves.

“It’s meant to be found, just not by machines,” Ana whispered, “The door will recognize any human voice print.”

She came to a halt in the center of the room.

“Open!” She commanded.

There was a heavy mechanical noise from below. A perfect square of the floor, just three meters across, began to rise up. An explosion of light came from below. Fareeha squinted, and was being carried forward again before her eyes could adjust. She could sense she was being carried down a staircase. She blinked a few times, and the interior of the hidden chamber came into view. Fareeha gasped.

There were stacks of books, boxes of artwork with framed paintings leaned against them. Elegant glassware and statues. Shelves of technological components.

“It will be all that remains of us,” Ana said, “Our culture, our history. If humanity somehow survives, in some isolated corner of the world, this will be waiting for them. And there’s something else...”

The vault had a small back room, the interior hidden from view by piles of artwork. Ana carried Fareeha forward. Ana and Fareeha both perked their ears up at the sound of a shifting movement up ahead. Ana stepped into the backroom. Inside was a large metal tube that Fareeha couldn’t identify, and a woman she definitely could. The Commander of the Paris Command Center stood next to the tube, wearing nothing but her dress pants and sports bra. Her coat was strewn across a chair in the corner, an array of medals hanging off of it. She looked at Ana in surprise.

“Funny seeing you here,” She said.

“I could say the same,” Ana said, “Or maybe not. Of course, you’d have yourself in mind.”

The Commander opened a large lid on the metal tube. Inside was a cubby hole just large enough to fit a person. The machine looked like a metal sarcophagus.

“Do you know what this is, Ana?” The Commander asked, “It’s the potential to leave a living record. Someone who can tell those who come after what happened here. I have access to the most information; it should be me.”

“What is that?” Fareeha asked, her head swimming.

“It’s a cryo-pod,” Ana said.

Fareeha felt the heated air of the gunshot on her lower back. The Commander’s right eye imploded, and her head snapped back. Ana carried Fareeha over to the pod, and laid her limp body inside.

“It’s state of the art,” Ana said, “Perfect preservation. It will keep you alive.”

“Mom, no,” Fareeha whispered, “No. I should die fighting, with the others. Don’t do this.”

Ana punched in a sequence in the small control panel on the machine’s side.

“Your father was captured,” Ana said, “And the machine that had him... it tortured him, to get me to come out of cover. Just like that machine in the landing bay did.”

“So let’s go see them pay for it,” Fareeha said, “Fight side by side, until the end.”

“Oh, Fareeha,” And said, stroking her daughter’s face, “You were willing to give up your life for those soldiers. I’m alive today because I stayed hidden.”

Fareeha found she could move her arm enough to clasp the side of the pod. She tried to pull herself out. Ana gently took hold of her shoulders and forced her back down, then moved her hand back down to her side.

“Mom, please,” Fareeha whispered.

“My daughter,” Ana cooed, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what world will await you when you wake up. Talon, the Omnics, this war... I’ve watched this world take everything I love away. Everything except you.”

Ana hit the ‘confirm’ button on the control panel. Fareeha felt an unearthly chill around her as the cryopod began filling with super-cooled fluid. Ana stood, and took hold of the lid. Her arm seemed to tremble. Tears fell from her eyes.

“You may hate me for this,” Ana said, “I’m not proud. But if the last thing I do is save you, I can accept that. Goodbye, Fareeha.”

Ana lowered the lid of the cryopod, plunging Fareeha into cold and darkness.


	14. Ichor

At first, all the ichor could feel was cold and darkness. It shifted its shape, tightened itself into ribbons and tissues, but it could discern no sensation, nor meaning to its actions. After a time, it recalled a structure it could create; a network within itself that let it feel and control its mass. Nervous tissue grew like roots or twisting vines through the black. They tightened themselves together into a mass at its center, and the formation of nerves recalled what it was to feel. 

Pain wracked the formless body. Every nerve in the structure was crying out for purpose, for connection, like it had been ripped from flesh it had no memory of being part of. The wave of agony was so intense that the budding lobe of nerves tore itself apart to escape it, and the ichor lost form once again. 

Yet it took mere minutes for the ichor to begin moving again. It grew its web of nerves through the mud of its body. It attached the nerves to forms of muscle tissue. When the nerves began bundling themselves together, like a mangled ball of yarn pulling itself into existence from loose thread, this time the thing was ready for the shock of pain. 

The agony was immense, and terrible, but wonderful. It carried with it glimmers of memory that splashed themselves over the growing neural webs. The slime remembered ancient battles, horrid injuries, burning rage and joyful cruelty. The ichor was sorting itself into a shape it could move about in. The thickest sludge tightened itself into solid rods for the muscles to actuate. The thing only needed to stand. There, in that debris-filled crater, a misshapen, crumbling parody of a human form attempted to raise itself out of the muck. 

Immediately, the sludge acting as bones gave way, and the thing splattered down against the rock. The ichor retained some sense of its humanoid form, but it lay on the dirt deflated and oozing like rotten fruit. It squirmed, and writhed, and with slopping, splattering flails of its arms, the hideous approximation of a boneless human being crawled blindly about, not certain what it searched for. It was by chance that its hand fell across the rusted, dented metal surface. It had made an almost hollow sound when struck that reverberated through the slime. The thing was curious what it had stumbled upon. Almost in reflex, the growing brain inside the lobsided head sent twisted coils of nerves forward. They pushed out of the slimy surface of the thing’s face before wrapping themselves into sickly yellow orbs. 

Light struck the rudimentary eyes hard enough to make the ichor flail and writhe, sending slime spraying in every direction. If the creature possessed vocal cords, it would be shrieking. It had created for itself a pair of eyes before recalling how to create the lids that covered them. The thing splattered one hand across its new eyes, the black ooze snuffing out the cruel light. 

When it raised its face again, it wore a squint. It darted its beady, slimy eyes to the object that had drawn its attention. It was a familiar shape, but a strange one. Not a shape that was usually made of metal. The bulky palm, the curling fingers- a hand. The ichor was looking at a massive metal hand, partially crushed, and apparently hollow by the look of where the limb terminated on the forearm. The ichor took its own right limb, and slid it into the opening of the powered armour gauntlet. 

There was something inside that made the ichor squirm in confusion. Another familiar sensation, but one of tactile feeling- a sense of shape. The ichor withdrew its slimy, shapeless limb, and along with it came a skeletal forearm, aged sinews barely holding the bones together. The ichor stared at the strange object, recalling its purpose and yet, not understanding. The slime of its arm squirmed across the bone, forming new muscle tissue that tightened the shape together. Two of the skeletal fingers fell away, and the hand that was formed was little more than a lobster-like claw, but the bones held their place. They gave structure. 

The thing looked around. It lay in a valley of death. Most of the corpses it saw were metal. It felt another memory tacking itself together in its mind. A long-forgotten hatred. In crevices and hidden spots, the ichor spotted remnants of men. Half of a skeleton nearby had a nearly intact leg bone. The ichor dug its new hand into the dirt and dragged itself towards the corpse. 

Several hours later, a wraith stood upon the broken rocks within the crater. It was a gaunt, emaciated thing, an incoherent jumble of sludge and bone. The limbs hung like withered branches. The ribcage was a mess of discordant bone. The face was made up of two separate skulls, leaving a split through the middle that placed its eyes off-center and its jaws misaligned. Black slime oozed from the eye sockets and over what teeth remained in the jawbone. The wraith looked around, then down to its own knobby, spidery hands. 

“I am...” It gurgled, still learning to force air through its throat, “I am the dead. Dead. _Death_. I am Death that walks.” 

The wraith turned to look at the mammoth building behind it. The sun was nearing its edge, and soon the crater would be cast in the Paris Command Center’s shadow. The massive door had been pried open. The wraith stumbled towards the entrance, learning to balance on its uneven limbs. 

Everything around it was death. Bone and metal forming only echoes of the shapes they took in life. Dripping tendrils of muck extended from the wraith’s legs and ran across the scattered bones as the creature walked over them. One tendril found a nearly intact tibia. It latched on and the bone was dragged along behind the shambling mess. As the tendril withdrew, the sludge of the leg oozed around the bone and drew it into the mass. The wraith stumbled, and glanced behind it, its eyes twitching about as they searched for what it had tripped over. 

Its mind was as formless and chaotic as its body. The wraith couldn’t remember its name, nor that it ever had one. Whispering voices floated through its mind; names and phrases the wraith couldn’t find meaning in. The pain wracking its body was changing; the sensations were different now, crying out to the wraith of some long-forgotten need. It couldn’t remember what the need was called, only that it made the wraith double over as it walked, desperately trying to remember what its body was trying to tell it. 

Though frequently blocked by slime, the wraith’s nasal passages were starting to pick up scents. Most of the smell of this world was dust, rot, and decay, but there was something else, something familiar. The wraith was, consciously or not, following a trail left by something that had moved here recently. Something that didn’t belong in this world of the dead. 

“Dead,” The wraith gurgled, “It’s all dead. Death. Pale... The name that sat on it was...” 

More thoughts, more half memories. Words spoken to it once, or by it. A life it lived, long ago. The remnants of humanity, remnants that now composed part of its body, held a certain... kinship. Where the skeletons lay, fading memories of life, the wraith shambled on, a satirization of the man it used to be. 

“My name...” The wraith whispered, “My name...” 

Still nothing. It was doubled over- the pain was emanating from its gut, begging the rest of the body to act. Though the thing’s organs were mere facsimiles, they functioned well enough to torture the mind with their desperate cries for sustenance. 

“I’m... hungry,” The wraith grunted, “I’m hungry.” 

The wraith felt the concept finally form itself together in its mind. It was starving; its crude stomach collapsing on itself over and over, trying to digest something that wasn’t there. The wraith came to a stop and looked down at a skeleton sprawled out on the ground. The sinewy hands still gripped a shotgun. The barrel was resting on the teeth of the lower jaw, the only remnant of the skull. The wraith grabbed the right collarbone and ripped it from the rest of the twisted shape. It gnawed on the long decayed bone, shattering a few of its teeth. 

Tossing aside the bone, the wraith rose its arm to its face and bit into its own viscous flesh. The chunk it took from its arm closed itself before the arm was even lowered down. It chewed the mouthful of sludge, ooze dripping from between its teeth. The slime was merging with the inside of its mouth, and when the creature tried to swallow, nothing travelled down the throat. The wraith roared in agony. 

“F- fu- feast. Feast on... their souls.” 

It was something it had said once. Something it had been. It had been death, walking the earth and consuming life. Had it ever been human? It couldn’t remember. The wraith fell to its hands and knees. Hitting the ground caused a bone in its left forearm to jut out of the elbow. 

“My name,” It spat, “Is...” 

A voice in its head, whispering from the past. A female voice that the wraith couldn’t put to face or name. 

_Reyes_

The wraith shot up from the floor and slammed two fists against the wall. It roared in anger, as if it could tear apart the walls around it with hate. 

“No!” It screamed, “No!” 

Not Reyes. Reyes was weak. Reyes was dead. 

The wraith stumbled forward, now supporting itself with a hand on the wall beside it. The other arm clutched its guts, as if trying to hold the gnawing hunger in. The scent it was following was getting stronger. 

The thing wandered the ruins of the building, its mind drifting in and out until it could make no guesses to how long it had searched. It didn’t even know if it was making progress, up until it reached the third floor and the scent flooded its senses. It stumbled towards a door labelled ‘Barracks’. To the creature, the lettering was meaningless symbols. It pushed its way through the door, and its beady, slimy eyes widened. 

A ways into the large room, down the row of empty cots, was the shape of a woman, laying with her back to the door. Her pale white skin and blonde hair seemed to glow in the darkness. The wraith sunk down, becoming an almost formless pile in its effort to conceal itself. The woman’s side rose and fell with her breaths. The wraith stared at the strange sight for a few moments, until it judged that the woman was asleep. Twisting its limbs about, reversing its knees, it transformed its structure into that of a shambling, four-legged crawler. It crawled along the floor like a reptile as it approached. 

It came to a stop at the edge of the cot, and listened to the sound of the woman breathing. She was alive. She was the thing that didn’t belong in the world of the dead. The wraith popped its knees back into position and stood up straight. Its form rose up over the sleeping woman, eyes locked on the shape of her. She was almost completely nude, save for a simple loincloth. Streaks of tears ran from her eyes to a large wettened spot on the pillow, yet the woman wore a soft smile. The woman was life; warm flesh and rushing blood, muscle and fat and sinew and skin and the wraith was very, very, hungry. 

* * *

Mercy opened her eyes, not roused by the sun, but by her own circadian rhythm, the only indication she would get within these darkened corridors that it was morning. She squirmed, and stretched, then rubbed her eyes. She’d been crying in her sleep again. 

She rose, and swung her feet to the side. She looked back at the withered, flattened pillow and the rotted sleeping bag sinking into the tearing, fraying cot. It had been the best sleep she’d had in months. She looked over to the weapon maintenance kit. The photograph had been returned, with utmost care, to its former position. It could not be made to appear untouched, as it was the only part of the kit clear of dust. Now its relative cleanliness drew the eye, and though Mercy’s own face stared back at her, the inscription on the back was tracing itself across her mind. 

Mercy took a deep breath, stood and picked up her rucksack. She might stumble upon some other relic of Fareeha somewhere in the base, and would want to bring it back to the cot, where she’d decided she’d be spending the next few days. The old cot would not likely survive multiple nights of use in its state, but perhaps she could bring one of the other cots over, and sleep next to Fareeha’s spot. 

Mercy set off from the barracks, and renewed her exploration of the command center. If the barracks were here, the civilian quarters should be a short way further on. Mercy knew there wasn’t a good state for the civilian quarters to be in; that was where noncombatants would gather in the event of a breach. Once the machines had gotten through the final defensive line, those quarters would be the site of perhaps the world’s last massacre. In the end, the last of humanity was killed to the final man, woman, and child. What could Mercy gain by seeing it? Was this her fate? To walk the earth, taking upon her soul the loss of every human life that ever was? 

At a corner up ahead, a pile of dead Omnics lay. It was as if each of the machines had fallen dead the instant it attempted to take the turn into the next hallway. A pile of twisted, rusted metal was far from an unusual sight to Mercy now, but something about this scattering of destroyed machines struck her as out of the ordinary. These Omnics had not been brought down by a hail of bullets, plasma, and explosives. They looked almost completely intact. 

Mercy gingerly stepped around the pile, ready to bolt if she spotted movement. In all her time since Oasis, she’d never seen an Omnic as active as RE-81, but she hadn’t been taking chances. This time, her fears were proven unnecessary; these machines were dead. Each one had its right eye-piece blown out. Mercy stared down at the strange image for a moment, and was suddenly struck with a pain in her skull that she hadn’t felt in some time; a rush of recall. 

“No,” Mercy said, “You weren’t here...” 

She crouched down and examined the damage on one of the Omnics. It had been an almost perfectly clean hit to the plastisteel lens. The only trace the bullet had left on the metal skull was a scrape along the upper edge of the eye socket; a trademark Mercy had come to recognize. 

Her eyes turned down the hallway the Omnics had been attempting to enter. The floor was carpeted with dead Omnics, sprawled over each other, dead where they’d hit the ground centuries past. Each had an eye-piece punched in by a single shot. Most had taken the single lethal strike to the right eye, some to the left. There must have been over a hundred Omnics dead here, killed with utterly ruthless efficiency. A macabre spectacle like this, Mercy could think of two people in the world who could accomplish it. McCree died days before the second crisis began, which left... 

There, at the end of the hallway, several meters past the line that represented as far as the Omnics got, was the lone defender who had made this stand. Perhaps a single surviving Omnic had gotten through the fusillade of impossible precision, or perhaps the Omnics had simply given up on getting through this hallway. The hall ended with a door labelled ‘Civilian Quarters’. Leaning back against the door was a single human skeleton. It was seated as if resting comfortably, never disturbed since death. In the skeletons lap was a DMR, the action open, the magazine absent. A custom handgun was in the skeletal hand, slide locked back. Piles upon piles of shell casings were scattered around the skeleton. It was the black eyepatch that truly convinced Mercy of who she was looking at. 

Tears fell from Mercy’s eyes. She’d always known that if she went looking for what had happened to the people she loved, she would find herself here. She had foolishly believed she was ready. She dropped to her knees on the carpet of dead machines. She looked up to the label on the door again. 

“You gave them time to...” She whispered, “You gave them time.” 

She crawled down the hallway to the lone skeleton. There was no obvious wound that Mercy could discern. She turned and put her back to the door and sat next to the skeleton. She put her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, sniffing helplessly at the snot trying to run from her nose. 

“It’s good to see you again,” She said. 


	15. Artifacts

A time epochs past. A different woman in a different life. Companionship, warmth, comfort... and food. She couldn’t have imagined then how much one could miss food. Gnawing hunger had been a constant companion. It would remind her of its presence every time she was shaken from drifting memories of the past.

In her former life, she saw herself in a small diner; maybe Israel. Ana Amari seated across from her, speaking softly. Mercy was eating a slice of cheesecake and attentively listening. Ana was smiling as she spoke, recounting a pleasant memory. Mercy recognized the name on her lips. She laughed as Ana finished the story.

“So like me when I was her age,” Ana laughed, “Truthfully. “

“She looks up to you a lot,” Mercy said, “It’s not by chance she follows your example.”

“I can’t imagine how invincible I’d have felt back then, had I been wearing that suit,” Ana mused, “I fear I’ve not taught her what I should have known at her age.”

“What’s that?” Mercy asked. She looked down to the seat beside her, where a cool blue leather handbag waited for the return of its owner.

“That true strength comes from those around you,” Ana said, “We’re not meant to fight alone.”

Mercy smiled, “I think she knows.”

Fareeha returned to the table. Light from the picture window cast a beautiful glow onto the woman, making her look like a goddess in that elegant blue dress. Mercy’s heart skipped a beat as she looked up at her.

“Hey, I’m back,” She said, sliding back into the seat next to Mercy. She gave Mercy a quick peck on the lips as she settled back down.

“Ahh, you missed the story,” Ana said, in mock despair, “You were in it.”

“Oh no,” Fareeha said, turning to Mercy, “Nothing embarrassing, I hope?”

Mercy often wondered, as she played through these bygone memories of her former existence, whether she truly spent so much time staring at Fareeha in doe-eyed awe of her beauty.

“Nothing embarrassing,” Mercy said.

“Okay,” Fareeha nodded, “May I have a bite of your cheesecake?”

“Yes.”

* * *

Alarm bells. Rushing soldiers in every direction. Explosions reverberating through the building. It was 40 hours into the assault on the Oasis Command Building. The  Omnics were crawling all over the building now. They were ripping the outer walls away, piece by piece, like predators tearing apart a live prey that had grown too weak to fight. Inside, however, the fight was anything by ceded. The soldiers of Oasis were holding in desperation against ten, twenty, a hundred times their number. The civilians were holed up in their quarters, around which the last of the defenses were being desperately gathered.

Mercy ran down the northern corridors of level 3, side-stepping a squad of soldiers going in the other direction. In her hands she carried a small box of medical vials, each filled with a silvery, shimmering fluid. There was enough for a few dozen doses, maybe. It was why she’d stayed in Oasis, and it would have to be enough.

An explosion rang out behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. The soldiers she’d passed were out of sight, but their muzzle flashes weren’t. The bursts of panicked fire began as a half dozen guns blazing, and was whittled down to one in seconds. Then, the only sound was approaching metal footfalls. Mercy dashed down the hall, only able to blindly hope she could outrun whatever was behind her. She almost made it to the end of the hall, a T-junction offering a left or right turn, when she felt a strange pulse of energy behind her. As if by a radical shift in gravity, she was yanked backwards, tumbling back down the hall. The container of vials flew from her hands, hit the floor, bounced, and then skittered along in the direction of the OR-16 unit. 

The hulking machine lumbered forward, lowering the gravity gun it had snagged Mercy with, and spooling up its rotary cannon. It paid no attention to the medical container that it was stomping towards; its eyes were locked on Mercy. Mercy pulled herself to her feet and dashed towards the container. Her fingers came within a hair’s breadth of it when the first bullet struck, ripping apart her shoulder. The next tore a hole in her side, and the third hit her just above the kidney. She was thrown off her feet again, this time leaving a spray of blood in her wake. She sprawled out on the floor, coughing up blood. The machine stopped, and adjusted its aim. Surely this would be the time.

Mercy felt an intense, glowing heat as the fireball shot over her. The projectile struck the OR-16 across the face, drawing its gaze up in surprise. With a swirl of air that felt like a tornado, an enormous hammer spun over Mercy, following after the fireball. Before the flying weapon even reached its target, Reinhardt was vaulting over her, in pursuit of his thrown weapon. Mercy clapped her hands over the two wounds to her torso, hoping to hold off at least some amount of blood loss. Reinhardt slammed into the ground, fired the thruster on his back, and caught up with his hammer as it struck into the machine. The monstrous quadruped was taken onto its back legs by the attack.

Mercy pulled herself up onto her knees. She was healing already. When she gave herself the experimental nano-biotic treatment, she hadn’t even known if it would save her from the bullet wound in her gut. It was clear the treatment was success, though the degree of injury she could recover from, she had yet to learn. Her whole body screaming in protest, she stumbled forward towards the medical kit; her last chance to share this gift with what remained of humanity.

The OR-16 ducked a punch from Reinhardt with speed that was strange to see from its massive frame. It extended a plasma-coated blade from its wrist, and thrust at Reinhardt’s gut. Reinhardt had been expecting the move; he caught the machine’s wrist with one hand, diverting the blade, and delivered a punch to the arm with the other, tearing it from the machine. The plasma along the blade remained long enough for Reinhardt to sever the machine’s head with it.

Reinhardt turned back to Mercy. His eyes were bagged, his weathered face streaked with sweat. He’d applied a fresh smearing of ash to his face and neck. His tired eyes widened when he saw Mercy. He’d seen her take a barrage of bullets; her second mortal wound of the night. Now here she was, standing in the hall, dripping blood from her shredded scrubs and gripping the medical kit. For a moment, he seemed unsure if what he was seeing was real. Then, recognition struck.

“The treatment you’ve been working on,” He said, “It works?”

“Maybe better than expected,” Mercy said, “Come to the infirmary.”

The intercom blared to life.

“Multiple new breaches along the North side! Large movement of Omnics on third level!”

Mercy and Reinhardt looked down the corridor from where the OR-16 had come. The approaching footsteps were like a low rumble that could be felt in the gut.

“No time,” Reinhardt said, “Go. I will hold them here.”

The Omnics came around the corner and opened fire. Reinhardt turned back to face Mercy, throwing his energy shield up over his shoulder. Mercy looked through the pale blue barrier, as spikes of red energy rippled across it. The horde marched steadily towards the shield, bristling cruel blades to accompany their guns.

“Go!” Reinhardt roared.

Mercy turned and fled, leaving footprints of her own blood. Reinhardt raised his hammer, dropped his shield, and spun towards the approaching horde.

* * *

“That’s how he died, I think.”

Mercy was lounging next to Ana’s remains. She was fiddling with one of the bullet casings that covered the floor. Every once in a while, she would get bored of the one she held, and flick it at the dead Omnics. Before long, a new one would find itself twisting its way between her fingers.

“At least, I didn’t see him again,” Mercy said, “So he must have held. And that hallway was overrun an hour or so later, I think. So... that’s probably where.”

More tears. Mercy reached into her knapsack and withdrew an aged plastic bottle. Still in functional condition, though the grooves on top were worn to uselessness. Water was held inside by a chunk of rubber jammed into the top. Mercy pulled the stopper out and took a drink. It had a bitter, almost chemical taste. Mercy wondered if she was tasting the poisons the Omnics had poured into the water supply; still keeping the water sterile after all these years.

“The way he... honoured Brigitte,” Mercy mused, “He wanted to carry her into battle with him. I didn’t understand it then. I think I do now. I’m glad you were here, Ana. I’m glad you were here for her in the end. I’d been so afraid to learn that she might have died alone. But if you’re here... that means she had you.”

Ana’s remains didn’t reply. Mercy wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her hand, then returned the bottle to her knapsack.

“If you stood out here,” Mercy said, “She’ll be inside? Maybe she... helped... in the end. Like I did.”

Mercy rose to her feet. She looked back down the hall. The way several Omnics nearby were piled caught her eye. They weren’t lain on top of one another, as if falling on top of each other in succession. They were slumped shoulder to shoulder. They’d been shot down so fast their bodies fell against each other.

“And if that’s where she is, through that door you held with your life...” She said, “Then maybe I’m not ready to see it yet. I’ll come back here later. I’ll-”

Mercy sighed, and pulled the sack’s strap onto her shoulder.

“If I buried every single corpse I’d ever found, I’d still be in Oasis right now,” Mercy said, “It doesn’t seem right that the only reason you get a grave and they don’t is because you were my mother-in-law. Oh, fuck it. I’ll be back to bury you later.”

Mercy left Ana where she lay, and went back the way she came, navigating the uneven carpet of metal bodies.

* * *

Mercy spent days wandering the labyrinthian building. She found more of the same sight everywhere she looked; warriors making their final stands. Blood spilled to hold ground. Skeletons still clutching weapons even though they lay in scattered pieces. The Paris Command Center was a haunting museum dedicated to an ancient, futile defiance, long forgotten by the besiegers, just as the defenders. 

In a few places, Mercy found hints that Fareeha had once been here. There were dead gargoyles on the roof that had been brought down with rockets and precise rifle fire. The landing bay was a devastated ruin. Fareeha would have launched into battle, day in and day out from that platform, hoping to kill the machines outside slightly faster than they could rebuild themselves. Whatever had happened here, the Command Center’s defenders had given up on the landing bay, and by the look of it, they had thrown so much explosive ordnance into it that any entrance from outside was rendered impossible by the piles of rubble and dead machines.

Mercy slept in the barracks, next to Fareeha’s cot. Each night, she had to replace the cot she slept on with another, as by morning the aged fabric had almost been torn through by her weight. A couple times, she was rudely roused from sleep by her body tearing right through the cot, and landing on the cold stone floor. Still, she kept up her search, each day finding new rooms, new artifacts, but each day failing to find the object of her quest. The one body Mercy dreaded most to find still eluded her.

In Serbia, Mercy had made an unexpected but fortuitous discovery; several pieces of sidewalk chalk hidden within the ruin of an elementary school. Mercy used the simple writing tool to draw out, to the best of her ability, a map of the Paris Command Center on the floor of the barracks. Keeping the layout of the place straight proved a daunting task. The bizarre layout of the building, with its web of interconnected staircases and corridors, had not been made any less confusing by the ravages of time. Mercy made an adjustment to the part of the map representing the fourth floor, wiping away the corridor she had drawn and replaced it with the room she was fairly confident would be behind the collapse that blocked that path.

“And that would match up with... that door, here,” Mercy said, rising up to her knees and staring down at her work, “So that leaves... this elevator shaft... goes to one of the basements, I guess, and... civilian quarters.”

Mercy sat down, sure to angle herself where she could see Fareeha’s cot. In front of it, propped up on stacks of rotted books, was a metal shelf, set up at an angle to work as a display podium of sorts. On it were the two most wondrous discoveries Mercy had made. 

One was a picture of Fareeha in military garb, complete with tidy beret, at a military awards ceremony. Mercy had found it in a pile of aged photographs and broken glass that had once adorned the wall they rested against. As soon as her eyes had fallen on that picture, she’d gotten another recall. The medal was for an operation Pharah had been a part of in Cairo. She’d dismantled her weapon and left it behind, so that she could carry two young children out of an urban combat zone. What news coverage of the awards ceremony hadn’t mentioned was the half-dozen-or-so hostiles she’d killed during the exfiltration.

The second was a magazine cover, salvaged from a pile of rotted paper in the corner of the infirmary. An exclusive interview with Fareeha Amari on flight systems. The cover was a glamour shot of Pharah, helmet tucked under her arm, gazing into the horizon. A beautiful and dramatic shot, but it struck Mercy as missing something. This wasn’t the true Pharah; her Pharah. When she closed her eyes, Mercy saw a wild, raging warrior, protecting the innocent by pouring out righteous fury on her enemies.

Mercy leaned back against the borrowed cot and gazed at the pictures. They were yellowed, they were crumbling, and they were beautiful. Perhaps the last great pieces of art in the world. Not for the first time, Mercy imagined what she might end up doing with the time ahead of her. She could travel the whole world, digging up every artifact and memento of Fareeha that still remained. The Command Center, even all of Paris, would be a museum to her. If someday this city could be a monument to this woman, and not to the extinction of the human race, then perhaps eternity might not be so awful.

Mercy rested her arms on the cot, and her elbow nudged the decayed, flattened pillow. She felt the slightest tactile sensation against her skin; an object not made of centuries-old fabric. She looked over at the pillow, and saw something poking out from beneath. Her elbow had brushed against its corner. Mercy reached over and grabbed the flat edge, and nearly pulled it straight out before stopping herself. Everything in this world was ancient, and with age came fragility. Mercy carefully slid her fingers under the old pillow and lifted it off the new find with care. She gasped.

Another photograph. This one treated with a minor holographic effect that had failed over time, leaving the image distorted but still comprehensible. Mercy carefully lifted the photograph by its edges and held it in front of her. Another recall. A photoshoot Fareeha had done. It might have been for charity, Mercy couldn’t remember. The lingerie was black, and elegantly designed. Fareeha’s skin looked slick with sweat. She ran her fingers through her wild and unkempt hair. She was staring into the camera with a look Mercy had once been intimately familiar with.

Mercy began to crack up. Her laughter filled the room and echoed out into the halls. A tear fell from her eye, and she put a hand over her mouth, stifling the cackles that bordered on howls of madness. She reached back and patted the old cot, its owner lost to time.

“Me too, buddy,” She said, “Me too.”

She carefully set the picture on the makeshift stand. She clasped her hands together, just in front of her mouth. She couldn’t help herself smiling. Eventually, she nodded and stood.

“You’re still here,” She said, “I don’t know where. Maybe Civilian Quarters. It’s time to find you.”

She checked over the map once more, and then walked out of the barracks, a destination in mind. She had been so distracted by her new  collection, she had paid no attention to the picture of herself that still sat in Fareeha’s weapon maintenance kit. If she had, she may have noticed that the photograph had been put down slightly askew, and a new stain of black slime now covered one of the corners.


	16. Despair

On the holoscreen, two teams raced back and forth across the field, chasing the checkered ball. The living room was arranged with cheap furniture, decayed and discoloured by years of cigarette smoke. Sat cross-legged on the carpet, his back to a coffee table adorned with an array of empty beer cans, the boy watched the football game with rapt attention. He was 9 years old.

In his periphery, he saw a shadow appear in the living room door. He looked over, expecting his mother, though it was too early to be called to dinner. The woman who stood in the door frame was older, her face crossed with deep lines. She wore thick glasses that were connected about her neck by a small chain. Her stance was hunched, so that she stood noticeably shorter than she would have in her prime. In both hands, she held a thick book, which the boy was accustomed to seeing her with.

“Grandma,” The boy said, “Would you like to watch with me?”

“Turn the television off, Gabriel,” The woman said.

The boy was surprised by the uncharacteristic firmness in her words. He stood, and waved his hand at the screen, switching it off. His grandmother nodded in approval.

“Come to the dining room,” She said, “I have something important to teach you.”

The boy dutifully followed. He took a seat at the end of the dining room table- actually a plastic table meant for a back porch, but the best his parents could do. His grandmother laid the book out on the table before him. It was perhaps the only thing in the apartment that might be older than her. Between the thin, delicate pages, old photographs were pressed of family members the boy didn’t recognize; they were too distant, or long dead.

“Leviticus again?” The boy asked.

“No,” His grandmother said, “Today, we’re going to look at the last of all the books. Someday, it will be the most important of them all.”

“Why?” The boy asked, already turned the pages towards the back of the mammoth tome.

“Because it is the book that tells us how this world will end,” His grandmother said, “It’s a warning, for the days when He pours out His Wrath on mankind.”

* * *

It was just a  two minute walk from Barracks to Civilian Quarters; where Ana Amari’s body lay in eternal vigil. She had been the last to fall; humanity’s final defender. Her defiance was a last spit in the face to the human race’s destroyers. A rage against the dying of the light. A statement that if we died, we would die on our terms. Mercy wasn’t certain what was waiting for her past that door, but she could feel the recall unravelling itself in her subconscious. She could feel those memories within, pushing against the barriers of her mind. What had happened in that room had happened in Oasis, and the moment she walked through that door, it would all come back. And after that, she supposed, another memory that she still hadn’t recalled in all this time.

The thought of remembering her own death, her true death, the death of the real Mercy, carried strange feelings with it. Why should it be different, for all the ways she had already perished? A hundred violent ends, with a hundred equally violent new beginnings. Were each of those lives a different person? A mind dragged unwilling into existence; to suffer, filled with memories of lives it never lived, just to die and return to oblivion? If Mercy could bear all those deaths,  surely she could take one more. So why was this aching feeling in her gut that it would change things?

Mercy’s eyes scanned the floor in front of her as she walked, looking to avoid jamming her toes against debris. She turned the corner into the hallway where Ana Amari had made her stand. The thought that, in all likelihood, Ana never saw her daughter die was of some comfort to Mercy. In battle, Pharah had seemed invincible; a raging, burning goddess of war. There had been few people in the world who could understand watching a person like that in action and fearing for their safety. Mercy had always suspected that sharing this fear with Ana had been the reason Ana had accepted her as a daughter-in-law.

As she neared the halfway point of the hallway, she felt a sensation that was becoming so foreign to her that it took her a moment to react to it; she saw movement in her periphery vision, directly ahead of her. Mercy looked up in confusion, and her heart clenched up. Her breath came out as dull whimper, and her entire body froze. The thing before her was towering; it stood almost two and a half meters. It was made of a black, fibrous slime that seemed to ooze in and out of shape constantly, causing the entire twisted form to undulate over its crude framework of bones. It stretched elongated limbs outwards, malformed fingers poking and prodding at Ana Amari’s skull. Mercy clapped a hand over her mouth. The thing was turned away from her, and it hadn’t yet shown itself to be aware of her presence.

“Unngh,” The thing grunted, “bone structure...  urggh . Female. No good.”

Mercy took a very slow step backwards. The twisted shape lurched over and seemed to sniff at the area around Ana’s skeleton.

“Sat here,” It said, “The woman. Guuhgg. Oils. Skin cells.”

The thing was pitch black amongst dark shadows. Mercy couldn’t tell exactly what it was doing. It sounded like it was licking the wall. Mercy took another step back, but this time her heel brushed a shell casing. She froze again, struggling to hold her balance. Any more weight shifted could send the casing skittering across the ground. She rose her foot back up, and set it a few centimeters to the side.

“No meat left. Never meat. No marrow in the bone. So hungry.”

The smell hit her. It was a stench she’d gotten whiffs of the past few days. She’d wondered if it had been some form of chemical the Omnics had dumped on the corpses to ensure all organic material was destroyed. But now that the stench filled her nostrils, she realized it was far more foul than that. The stench was rotting meat and decaying, worm-ridden fat, pus and waste and infection. Mercy’s whole body rebelled against her efforts to remain silent. She keeled over and bile struck the floor. There was no solid mass, only water.

The thing turned to face her. As Mercy coughed out the last bits of the throw-up, she stumbled backwards, hoping to put some distance between herself and that smell. The thing’s face was a skull with a clearly mismatched jawbone, giving the whole structure of its face a bizarre concave look. Black slime oozed from all of the features of the skull. Mercy made it two or three steps backwards before tripping, sending herself falling backwards onto the carpet of dead Omnics. Her head struck against a robotic leg, and she cried out in pain. When her left arm came down, it came down on a sharpened edge of torn metal, stabbing into her flesh. She opened her eyes, and she was greeted with the face of the creature, staring down as it sprawled over her.

“Meat,” The thing growled, “Rruugh. Flesh. Mercy.”

“Oh god,” Mercy cried out, “Oh god.”

“God...” The thing whispered, “Wrath...”

Mercy planted her foot in the thing’s chest, and pushed, aiming to kick the thing off of her. Instead, her foot went through the slimy tissue, and burst out the back, pushing the spine out in front of it. The sensation of the wriggling ooze around her leg made her skin crawl all over her body. The thing’s legs went limp, and the slime melted off the assortment of bones. Mercy tossed the still formed upper half to the side, pulled her arm from the jag of metal, and scrambled to her feet. She put herself against the wall, looking down as the slime congealed once more into a single mass.

“What the fuck,” Mercy panted, “What the fuck are you?!”

“Mercy...” The thing groaned, squirming about on the floor. The puddle of slime pulled the legs bones back into place, and the tissue began reforming around them.

“How do you know my name?” Mercy demanded.

“Mercy,” It said, “Overwatch. Remember you.”

It was like a punch in the chest.

“Oh Jesus,” Mercy whispered, “Reyes.”

“My name is not Reyes!” The thing screeched.

Its legs were still in the process of reforming. It stood up too quickly, attempting to flail at Mercy. Instead, it collapsed over a small pile of Omnic bodies, further twisting its amorphous body out of shape.

“Oh no,” Mercy said, “All this time, you... You’ve been awake? How long?”

The wraith fought its way onto its knees, popping its limbs back into their sockets. The jawbone was allowed to hang uselessly by a tendril of slime, the thing’s words slurred by the wild flailing of the tongue.

“Long,” The wraith said, “So long without food.”

It turned to face Mercy. The jawbone was yanked back into place.

“Wha... wait,” Mercy said, “Listen-”

The wraith lurched at her, the slime receded from its fingers, leaving only sharpened bones. One hand clasped around Mercy’s throat, the other one thrusting at her gut. Mercy didn’t try to break the thing’s grip. She didn’t try to fight against its momentum to stay standing. Instead, she fell backwards, bracing both knees against the thing’s ribcage and pushing up, redirecting momentum. The wraith flew over her head and was dashed to pieces against a pile of  Omnic bodies behind her. Mercy rolled onto her front and pushed off the ground, back up and at the ready in mere seconds.

“Meat,” The thing said, as it started pulling itself together again, “Blood, muscle, fat. Unnrgh.”

Mercy glanced behind her, at the door to Civilian Quarters. She’d placed herself on the wraith’s opposite side. She ran forward, charging past the slime towards the way she came. A tendril of ooze reached out from the muck pile and lashed at her ankle. She nearly tripped, but sent the tendril splattering across the wall. She took a sharp right turn, taking her further from the barracks. Behind her, the wraith dragged itself back together once more, its salvaged collection of bones all the more disorganized. It watched her vanish around the corner, then sniffed at the air. Its eyes locked on to the jag of metal sticking up from the floor, painted with blood. The creature bent over, stuck out its tongue, and ran it over the sweet fluid.

Mercy took corners and doors with desperate speed. It didn’t take long for her to completely lose track of where she was, but she didn’t care. As long as she put more distance between herself and that creature.

It had been Reyes. A black shadow with a skull for a face. He’d worn that absurd costume while he helped Talon unleash the Talon Virus, starting the second crisis. Mercy had seen the research into the experiments Moira  O’Deorain had done on him. How had it not occurred to her that he could still be alive? Was he still alive? 

Mercy’s mind raced as she thought of places to hide. Her lungs burned from her desperate, gasping sprint, and she knew she needed to stop. She rounded one last corner, and put herself against the wall. She held an ear out while trying to catch her breath. For a moment, she heard nothing.

“Mercy!” A distant shouting, “The children of Israel wept and said ‘who shall give us flesh to eat?’”

Mercy trembled. She slipped away from the corner, further down a hall she couldn’t place within her mental map. Where could she hide? Where could she avoid this horrid new threat?

_ The elevator shaft _ , she thought.

She’d been wondering what logic drove the design of the elevator shaft since she found it. Though she had yet to place where exactly the shaft stopped, she had confirmed that there were no landings on any floor beneath it. For whatever reason, someone had placed a way to reach one of the basements in an out-of-the-way spot on the fourth floor. Mercy had yet to risk climbing down into that darkness, but now, it was the only refuge she could think of. Mercy looked about the intersection of hallways she’d found herself in, searching for the right path. She made an educated guess and took off running.

After a few minutes of cautious navigation, she approached her objective. She slowed to a halt, then crouched, taking the rest of the trip as quietly as she could. She peaked down the last hallway and saw the door. It had once carried the label Sub-basement 3. The machines had surpassed the keypad by tearing the door from its hinges. The elevator car inside had sunk down a meter or so, time gradually laxing the wires, so that there were gaps where one could crawl either into the precariously positioned car, or onto its roof.

A sound echoed through the quiet; a strange skittering, like something crawling through a vent. Mercy inched forward towards the elevator, stealing glances left and right. Something above caught her eye; a vent grate in the ceiling, just before the door. She looked up at it, afraid to move forward and place herself under it. Clinging to one wall, she inched by, ready to bolt at the sight of slime dripping down. When she was mere meters from the door, she broke into a desperate, tip-toeing run. She pushed her upper body through the gap, aiming to climb on top of the car to access the service ladder.

Her feet lifted off the floor of the hallway and very nearly disappeared into the elevator. A slimy, bony hand snagged hold of Mercy’s left ankle, and tightened its grip. Mercy gasped and made a hopeless effort to pull herself from the grip, but with a strength Mercy wouldn’t have believed Reyes’ emaciated frame capable of, her entire body was yanked backwards and sent sprawling into the hallway.

Mercy writhed and screamed and tried to crawl away. The Reyes-thing stumbled towards her, its jaws hanging open, slime oozing over its teeth. It held up its left forearm, and sank its fingers into its own tissue. With a slimy pop, it pulled one of the bones out- the Ulna. It placed one end in its mouth and bit down, snapping the end of the bone off, leaving a cruel shiv. Mercy helplessly raised her hands to defend herself. The wraith pounced forward, and Mercy felt the sharpened bone stabbing through her palm.

The wraith struggled on top of her, trying to get its left hand around her throat. Mercy screamed as she pushed against bone, the bloody tip of the weapon coming out of the back of her hand and pointed right at her chest. The thing’s left arm was weakened by the loss of the bone, and Mercy could easily shove it away, but the thing was putting all of its weight on the bone shiv, and it was descending ever so slowly down. Mercy stopped resisting against the wraith’s left hand. She stole a gulp of air before it wrapped around her throat. Then, Mercy grabbed hold of the wraith’s right wrist and pulled. The bone shiv was ripped from her hand, and the weight behind it drove it to the floor beside her. Mercy punched the wraith across the head with her massacred hand, causing herself more pain than it.

The wraith clapped its left hand over her face. Mercy frantically clawed at the hand, but it was like it was simply melting into a slime, clinging to her skin, trying to squirm between her eyelids. Mercy only managed to get the black ichor under her fingernails before she felt the bone shiv stab into her throat. She shrieked in pain, feeling the edge of the bone cutting against her vocal cords. The thing removed the shroud it had place over her eyes and, with both hands, ripped the bone shiv back out. Mercy coughed as her blood sprayed into the air. The world around her faded out, and the last thing she heard was the wraith’s drooling.

* * *

She sprinted down the hallway of the Oasis Command Building, bullet-tattered scrubs barely hanging on to her body. Tucked under one arm was the container of vials. Giving her new regenerative abilities to all the wounded soldiers in the infirmary might just be their last chance to turn the tide here. They could take back the Command Building, shrugging off injury, and striking back against the Omnics as relentlessly as the machines had been attacking them. A resistance made up of regenerating soldiers would be a force to be reckoned with. And if it were given to Fareeha... Mercy couldn’t even imagine what she would become capable of.

In her other hand she held a plasma pistol. The dead soldier she had taken it off of had given it a wildly dangerous-looking number of modifications. A fusion core was wired into series with the power cell, giving every single shot a massive boost in power, and a non-zero chance of the gun exploding and killing the user instantly. It seemed the perfect weapon for the occasion. She didn’t know if any corner she went around would reveal human or machine, and she wasn’t counting on another rescue.

She turned the corner to the infirmary. The two soldiers at the door tensed their grip on their rifles. Mercy quickly pointed the pistol to the ceiling, and the soldiers relaxed, breathing sighs of relief and quickly pointing their guns to the floor.

“Doctor,” One of them said, “We weren’t sure if you- holy fuck.”

The soldier had noticed the blood staining Mercy’s scrubs, along with every inch of her exposed skin below the neck.

“Relax,” Mercy said, “I’m fine. I need to get in there and start distributing this.”

“Ma’am, Command is initiating Evacuation Protocol,” The other soldier said, “All of the most valuable personnel are being put on the Orca and making an attempt at getting to Paris.”

“The people still here-” Mercy began.

“The security forces will give medical personnel as much time as they can to assist civilians. We have orders to get you on that airship, Ma’am. Please come with us.”

“Not a chance,” Mercy said, “Get out of my way.”

One of the soldiers took a step forward.

“We were told not to take ‘no’ for an answer, Ma’am.”

Mercy levelled the plasma pistol directly between his eyes. She started charging up the shot, the fusion core humming worryingly.

“There are injured through that door that need my assistance,” Mercy stated, “What I have here could save the lives of everyone in that room, and enable them to save the lives of everyone in this building. If you stand in between me and my patients for one more second, I will fucking kill you.”

The soldier stared, dumbfounded, into Mercy’s eyes a moment, then stepped aside. Mercy clicked the safety to cancel the shot, and the rising hum became a fading whine. Then, she walked past the guards into the infirmary.

There were rows of beds, crammed together as tightly as could be fit in some places. Soldiers missing limbs, soldiers with holes ripped in their torsos, some men who were unconscious and wouldn’t live long enough to wake up again. The last of the medical personnel were using the last of the medical supplies. Mercy used a desk chair as a stepping stone to one counter, so that she towered over the room.

“Everybody, listen up!” She said, “This is an experimental nanobiotic treatment. If it works, it can heal every one in this room; even get them back into fighting shape tonight. We can still survive this!”

Mercy saw in their faces the absurdity of the promise. The impossibility. The desperate hope. She dropped down from the counter and held out the container to a young nurse.

“I need 500 ccs of this given to each casualty,” She said, “If they’re mortally wounded, make it 550 cc. Then we need to-”

Mercy was cut off by a sound that made her breath catch in her throat. Heavy metallic footfalls- directly above them. The medics all turned their eyes upward to the ceiling. There was utter silence for a moment. Mercy risked a low whisper.

“Get the soldiers in here right-”

The ceiling blew apart. Massive metal forms dropped into the room, crushing medics and injured alike under their heavy frames. Five Bastion units had dropped into the room. Mercy took aim at the first, but the fifth to drop in crashed down next to her, knocking her to the side and sending the plasma shot into the wall. She made a weak effort to hold the container to her chest, and almost got her fingernails to clasp hold of the gap in the case’s lid, but her impact with the ground freed the case from her grasp, and sent it spinning towards the floor. The door to the room was thrown open, and the two soldiers rushed in, rifles raised. The case struck the ground, popped open, and a dozen vials of glimmering fluid flew out, skittering along the floor with soft chiming impacts, like the sound of a wind chime that heralded an apocalyptic storm. Everyone fired at once.

The entire room became a spray of red mist. Bodies on cots were riddled. The two soldiers each took a barrage of shots. Bullet impacts sent showers of sparks off of the Bastions. Mercy fired a plasma shot from the floor and blew the nearest Bastion’s head off. Its gun-arm drooped and fired a burst- right at where the vials had scattered on the floor. Three or four of them were shattered by the random spray before the Bastion fell backwards. The injured soldiers who still lived were joining in the desperate blast-out, firing pistols from their cots even as their bodies were shredded with high-caliber rounds.

The young woman Mercy had held out the container to fell to the floor next to her. Her lower jaw had been blown off, her eyes vacant. A bullet-riddled Bastion stumbled over to her, planted a foot down on the corpse’s chest, and opened fire into the skull. It kept firing until Mercy could charge up another plasma shot and blow a hole through its chest. The Bastion stumbled forwards, trodding across another of the vials. Mercy dove forward, and grabbed hold of one. She turned it over in her hands and saw that the bottom of the glass tube was cracked, the precious substance inside leaking out onto the floor. She tossed the broken vial aside and grabbed another. This one was intact. She wrapped her fingers around it tightly; her last hope in the palm of her hand. Then, before she could react, she was in the air.

A Bastion had grabbed her by the ankle and tossed her across the room. She instinctively pulled herself into the fetal position, then went limp as she struck the wall. She slammed into the ground winded, and hurting, but uninjured. She scrambled for the door out of the infirmary opposite from the one she entered- the door that led to Civilian Quarters. The sound of human weaponry firing had stopped; only dying screams remained to counter the blaze of  Omnic guns. Mercy scanned the room, hopelessly searching for someone she could drag out of the room alive. She locked eyes with a soldier across the room. One Bastion, its gun-arm destroyed and eye-piece sparking, held him by the back of the neck. A second Bastion’s gun was jammed, but it was content to drive its weapon into the bullet wounds in the man’s gut. The look on his face chilled Mercy to her core. The safety lever popped off of the plasma grenade in his hand. Mercy could do nothing but sprint frantically out the door. The blast at her back knocked her off her feet.

She hit the floor once again. She tucked her arms and legs in tightly and rolled, only able to blindly hope she’d run out of momentum before striking a wall. When she slid to a stop, she could do nothing for a moment but lay on the floor, breathing heavily. Her ears were ringing, but she felt the distant gunfire reverberating through her bones. The heat of the plasma in the air carried with it the stink of aerosolized blood. There was something wet in Mercy’s hand. Mercy looked down. The vial was in shards, stabbed into her palm. The last of the nanobiotic fluid dripped from her fingers.

* * *

Her lungs dragged in a breath, expanding once more as her heart kicked into motion again. Pain wracked her body. Her flesh itched like she’d had to regenerate half her torso. RE-81 had disemboweled her once. She was dead for a while that time, if he was to be believed. When she came back, it had felt like this. The only difference was that this time, the first thing she became aware of, after the pain, was the smell of cooking meat.

Mercy opened her eyes. Her arms were restrained, pulled above her head, leaving her on her knees on the hard ground. Looking down, she was relieved to see her guts intact, though it was clear from the itching sensation that they’d not been in this state long. Mercy looked up, and saw that her hands had been wrapped tightly in coils upon coils of chain, which had been hung from the over-hanging hand of a dead mech. She was outside again, the night sky brilliant overhead, though she was still within the ring of dead Omnics around the Command Center.

Mercy heard the sound of ravenous chewing. She looked to the only light source: a campfire that had been set up in the dirt before her. At first Mercy was unable to identify the fuel source, before she placed it as her knapsack, presumably along with everything flammable that had been in it. In a moment of terror, Mercy imagined she might have been carrying a picture of Fareeha. After a moment, she reassured herself that she’d left those precious belongings in the barracks. Not that that meant they were safe.

Over the fire, a rusted rifle was propped, the bayonet an improvised skewer with several pieces of meat dangling from it, glistening in the flames that licked at them. Another sound of tearing flesh. On the other side of the fire, the wraith sat, a piece of unevenly cooked flesh in its hands, chewing at it like a wild animal.

“Oh fuck,” Mercy whispered.

Mercy wanted to vomit. She didn’t know what trying to throw up out of such recently regrown organs would do. The wraith took another bite.

“Hello Mercy,” The Reyes-thing said, flecks of meat flying from its teeth, “So, you don’t die either, huh?”


	17. Famine

“And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”

The boy followed the strange words of the text, wondering at the twin-columned structure of the page. He listened to his grandmother’s words; her hand reassuring on his shoulder.

“The people who don’t believe in Him?” The boy asked.

“Yes, dear.”

“But, are they all bad people?” He asked.

Now his grandmother turned, and returned to her seat, which was already facing him. She waved her hand about, a motion which conveyed nothing explicit, but wordlessly signaled the boy to turn to face her. He obliged, careful to leave the bookmark, itself bearing Matthew 4:4, in the correct place on the page. She looked down into his eyes. Her face was gentle, but expectant.

“I mean,” The boy said, “Not all my friends in school believe in Him, but-”

“First Corinthians Six, Nine and Ten.”

The boy closed his eyes, wracking his mind.

“’Know ye not that the... unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God?’” He read out from his subconscious, “’neither fornicators-’”

His grandmother cleared her throat softly.

“Wha-? Oh- ‘Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor... adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,’”

“That’s homosexuals.” She interjected.

The boy paused, and looked up at her, unsure if he should continue. Her face was stone.

“...’Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers... nor extortionists, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

His grandmother nodded in approval.

“So,” She said, “Do you see?” 

* * *

The rusted, creaking chains were intertwined about her fingers, cutting off circulation and calling forth cries of protest from her knuckles when she tried to move. It took several seconds of twisting and shifting the coils to gauge the job Reyes had done on the knots. Mercy wasn’t getting out of this without breaking a few fingers. She swung her weight upwards and, though her right wrist twisted in horrendous fashion, she planted a foot on either side of the bolt the chains hung from. The Reyes-thing watched Mercy swing herself about, even hanging herself upside down, with a curious stare. It took a bite of the meat in its hand.

“Good seeing you again,” It called out.

The bolt that held the chain was set into the surface of the mech’s palm. Mercy was hanging from the massive outstretched hand like a tangled marionette. Perhaps by rotating, she could undo the bolt; untangle the chains from her hands while she sprinted away into the night.

“Can’t remember-  _ rhuggh _ \- the last time I saw anyone,” The wraith continued, “Been so hungry. Can’t remember the last time I talked to anyone who was real.”

“Not this shit again,” Mercy grunted, “Not again.”

She felt her wrist give way. There was a sickly pop, and Mercy’s mass swung back downwards, her legs hitting the dirt, her hands still tangled in the chains. She held back tears of pain.

“Stop hurting yourself,” The wraith said.

“Fuck you,” Mercy spat, “I won’t be a prisoner. Not again.”

The Reyes-thing took another bite. Mercy glared at it long enough to identify the flesh in its hand as a human liver.

“Again?” He asked.

“The Omnic...” She said, weighing the point of secrecy in her head, “One of them kept me prisoner. He killed me over and over... Not ever again.”

“It was pretending that killing you permanently was what it was after?”

Mercy twisted her forearm and with another unseemly popping sound, her wrist snapped back into position, somewhere within the mass of chain. Mercy let out the pained breath she’d been holding inside; the fresh wave of pain had a hint of relief flowing beneath it. She rested her face against one suspended arm, sweat running down her brow. After a moment, she glanced at the creature, finally hearing his question.

“Yes,” She said.

The wraith took another bite. A rotten tooth came away from its mouth, stuck into the meat. The wraith seemed to find this unpleasant; it tossed the liver away into the darkness. It lurched over to where Mercy was bound, sharp bones protruding from one arm. She felt a tightness in her chest, terror at what this creature might have planned next. With a strike Mercy could barely follow with her eyes, the chains fell down around her. The coil had been bisected, destroyed links tumbling down around Mercy’s head, bouncing off the messy locks of her hair. She pulled her hands down and examined them. They were twisted, and bruised, but unbroken. The wraith walked back towards its seat.

“ Omnics tortured me like that when they were done killing humanity,” It said, “Again and again. Maybe they stopped ‘cause they didn’t think anything left of me was still human. Maybe they just got bored.”

Mercy didn’t know how she was supposed to respond. She sat there, on her knees, surrounded by the remnants of her bondage. The wraith lounged on a stone coated in slime, forgotten or discarded bones laying in puddles of ichor around it. Nothing but silence around them, nothing between them but the crackling fire and the smell of searing flesh.

“What do I call you?” She asked.

The wraith reached over the fire and pulled another piece of meat from the skewer. It set the unevenly cooked mess, with deliberation, upon a formation of scrap that Mercy had initially mistook for a pile of debris. The thing was two small dishes, perhaps radio dishes, connected by a pipe, and hung from a chain at its mid-point. An awkward and unreliable set of weigh scales. The piece of Mercy’s body had been placed on one side, sending the hanging portion of the contraption askew. The Reyes-thing extended a crumbling hand over the other dish. With a dull clatter each, finger bones were dropped onto the scales, until they were balanced, as well as they could be, with the flesh. Then, the wraith claimed the piece of meat and took a ravenous bite. The fingerbones fell and scattered.

“Power was given unto him over the Earth, to kill with sword, and with _ hunger _ , and with death, and with the beasts of the Earth.”

Mercy rubbed her wrists, feeling the blood flow return.

“I don’t know what that means,” She said.

“Would you like something to eat?” The wraith asked, holding an offering hand out to the meat over the fire.

“I’m not that hungry,” Mercy said, “Not yet.”

The wraith shrugged, and after a moment, continued.

“In the last days, God sent four beasts to herald the coming of four Horsemen,” The Reyes-thing said, “The first of the Horsemen was Death. He walked among the living, and by striking with his sword, set the stage for what was to come.”

_ Oh shit, _ Mercy thought.

“Reyes,” The wraith said, saying the name as if it might choke, “He sat upon the Pale Horse.”

“That’s what that-” Mercy stammered, “That ridiculous costume was?!”

“Then came the time of the Red Horse,” The wraith said, “Power was given to who sat thereon to take peace from the Earth, and kill with a great sword.”

“War?” Mercy asked, “You mean the second crisis.”

“No,” The wraith said, locking its slimy yellow eyes on her, “The first. The Red Horse poured out His Wrath upon the world, and Reyes was chosen to sit the Pale Horse, to cleanse the unrighteousness from the world.”

“How long have you been awake?” Mercy asked, “How long have you been alone?”

“Why keep track of time?” It asked.

Mercy put her head in her hands. After a moment, she pulled herself to her feet, and looked for a rock or dead machine that would make a passable seat. None of this made any sense. The man she’d known, first through affiliation, then through scattered stories of terrorist attacks, hadn’t been religious. Not that she could see, anyway. How much had she truly known of this man? How much remained of him in this mad creature?

“If Reyes had done as he had been called,” The wraith said, “The Revelation would have been completed when it was supposed to. God’s Wrath would have been poured out on the Earth and then the faithful would be let in to the new Kingdom. Instead, Death fought against War, and God’s Wrath went unsated. Suffering continued on the Earth.”

“How long was I dead?” Mercy asked, “When you gutted me?”

The wraith paused, as if taking a moment to comprehend the question.

“You were trying to close up while I was trying to get the liver out. An hour or two, maybe.”

“That’s interesting,” Mercy said, “Go on.”

The wraith stood now, its precarious frame shaking with excitement.

“But God’s plan would still be completed! Through the scientist, God struck down Reyes, and made him anew, bestowing new gifts upon him. His name would be no longer be called Reyes, but Reaper! And to atone for his sin, he would restore War to the Earth.”

“That’s why you joined Talon,” Mercy hissed, “That’s why you helped them.”

The wraith issued a dark, gurgling chuckle. A twisted grin pulled itself along its mock features.

“I did more than that,” It said, “ Ogundimu , the great  Doomfist , he had a plan for the virus. Make the  Omnics turn violent again. Humans and machines, fighting all over the planet. I guess I figured it would work well enough to bring War back. But  Doomfist’s aspirations were too... small. His virus had  _ contingencies _ .”

There was an uncomfortable knot forming in Mercy’s throat.

“The  Omnics would never have completed God’s Work, you see,” The wraith said, “The virus would have shut them down if humanity was close to losing. The second  Omnic Crisis? Would have lasted a month, at most, going the way it did. So, I made that girl change the virus. Forced her, really. And when she was done, I killed her for helping me. I was cruel to that girl.”

“What did you do?” Mercy whispered.

“I made her transfer an imprint of my mind into machine code,” The wraith said, the edges of its mouth stretched back in inhuman fashion, “And add it to the virus. I made every  Omnic in the world just a little bit like me.”

Rebar striking bone echoed through the artificial canyon. Chunks of skull were scattered across the dark ground, along with an uneven spray of black sludge. Mercy had grabbed the short length of steel from where it had been leaning, against a broken chunk of wall, and dashed the wraith’s head off with it. The headless form flailed, and spasmed, and spewed more black pus out of the destroyed remnants of its head.

“You killed everyone!” Mercy screamed, “You killed everyone I love! You burned the entire world down for a goddam fantasy!”

The wraith dragged its aberrant form across the rocks, until it found the body of a soldier who’d died clutching a heavy machine gun. It grabbed the skull, wrenched it from the mess of bones, and shoved it into the blubbery mess of its head. Ooze took shape around the skull and pulled it into place. Mercy raised the rebar above her head to destroy this new simulacrum. The thing held out a desperate hand to stop her. She held her improvised weapon in place.

The wraith snatched at the soldier’s lower jawbone and attempted to shove it beneath its pilfered skull. It gagged on the rib it had thrust into its throat, and tossed it away. It grabbed the correct bone and shoved it into place with enough force that the bone cracked in half, and became like two hanging ornaments astride the tongue.

“’And we know that all things work together for good,’” It said, “To- ‘to them that love God!’”

The thing was recoiling as if Mercy terrified it.

“I didn’t forget, I didn’t forget that part!” It begged, “’to them who are the called according to His purpose!’”

Mercy was weeping again.

“You killed everyone. You killed her!”

The rebar sliced through the air again. An arm rose to block the strike; the bones shattered, but the weapon’s path diverted. Another hand thrust towards Mercy’s throat; slime drawn back from the sharpened tips of fingerbones. It wrapped its claws around her neck, and she felt the fingers dig into the flesh. She didn’t clasp at the wrist; instead, she took the rebar by both ends and brought it down on the forearm, tearing through the slimy limb and freeing her from the rapacious grasp.

A bubbling mass of pus on the creature’s midsection burst like a cyst. Shards of bone plunged into Mercy’s gut, her left shoulder and upper thigh. She squealed in shock and pain. She stumbled back, staring down at the twisted blades sticking out of her flesh. The Reyes-thing contorted its body, pulling bones from the rubble around it into its form. Ribs twisted outward and became hooks rising from its flesh. More joints were growing into the mismatched, uneven fingers, turning them into long, hooked talons. Chunks of skulls pushed their way up out of the slimy skin, half-formed faces growing around them, ushering forth screams of rage, agony, and hate. Mercy ripped the largest of the bone shards from her shoulder, and gripped the rebar tighter.

“The bowls of War and Death are poured out!” The thing roared, “The unrighteous burn in the lake of fire. Now, it is only us to bear God’s Wrath.”

The shard in her thigh came out. A spew of blood from her femoral. Mercy did her best to match the wraith’s stare as she held a hand down on the wound. The shard in her gut was dripping that black slime that burned like acid against her skin and threatened to set her insides on fire.

“Is that what you’re doing?” She asked, “Is... is that what you think we’re both doing?”

The wraith looked her up and down. It turned its eyes towards the Paris Command Building, dark and daunting, though it was lit by a million stars.

“I’ve been wandering this earth, seeking food without fulfillment, seeking death without reprieve,” The thing said, “Looking for those who might have survived the Horsemen of War and Death. I guess I got tired. Fell down right over there. Three decades, maybe. Why? What are you doing?”

Mercy felt the familiar sting of her body healing. Tissue pulling itself together by force. She looked at the ashes of her belongings in the fire.

“I’m looking...” She began, “I’m hoping to find something. Something to... remember somebody.”

The bones jutting out across the wraith’s body sagged as the flesh around them melted. Some slid down its body, others tumbled from the jagged form. Some were pulled into the black mass, disappearing from sight, despite the thing’s emaciated frame.

“’And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.’”

Mercy stared back at the creature. She caught her grip on the rebar laxing, and tightened it again.

“Call me Famine,” It said, “Do you not want to fight?”

Fareeha wouldn’t sit down and talk to this thing. Of that, Mercy was certain. Fareeha would tear this thing apart until it didn’t come back together. She would avenge all of humanity, one at a time, if that was what it took.

“I’m not your fucking food,” Mercy spat.

“I receive no sustenance from you, for my flesh can only consume itself,” It said, “Your flesh is decadence, it would seem. It was sin to partake in it.”

“Oh... okay, then,” She said, “That means you don’t put a hand on me?”

“Yes.”

Mercy let the rebar hang at her side. She looked at her rucksack. The thin chain that had served as a strap glowed red hot within the flames. Everything of true value Mercy had in this world- the artifacts of her- were stored or stashed away in the barracks. Mercy could only hope the creature hadn’t discovered where she’d been sleeping. The bag had held her water bottle, tangles of wire, polyesters scraps, and not much else.

“You burned my stuff,” She said.

“I had hoped your flesh would satisfy me,” Famine replied, “I was arrogant in using what fuel I could find. I’m sorry.”

Mercy scoffed, “You’re sorry.”

“Allow me to make reparations.”

Mercy eyed Famine suspiciously. She looked up at the wall of dead machines. Over it, the carcass of an ancient battlefield that stretched to every horizon.

“And how would you do that?” She asked.

Famine laughed. It rose up, its squirming mass adding bones to its own height. It stretched its arms out and gesticulated wildly.

“’And he  sware unto her,  whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.’”

Mercy sat  down, the rebar held close. With another grim chuckle, Famine shrank down to more humanoid size, its aggrandized form shrinking like melting plastic. It returned to its seat and spat a few broken teeth into its palm. It considered these, then placed them on the scales. A single piece of Mercy’s body remained on the skewer.

“I’ve only seen a small part of this city,” Mercy said, “In the places I’ve seen, I’ve found monuments to a woman.”

“Fareeha Amari,” Famine nodded.

Breath caught in her throat. Mercy hadn’t heard the name spoken aloud since...

“Called her Pharah, didn’t they?” It said, “Made her an idol.”

“Do know all the places in Paris that have traces of her?” Mercy asked.

Famine puzzled a moment.

“I want to know everywhere I can find something left of her,” Mercy said, “Every artifact. Every footprint.”

“Did you know her, Mercy?” Famine asked, “Did I? I met her mother. Fought her mother, I think. Did I ever meet... her, though? Who is she to you?”

Mercy could answer that question until the sun rose and fell again, a hundred times over, and she wouldn’t even have begun.

“That’s my business,” She said, “What I ask of you is that you do nothing to damage or disturb any remnant of... of Fareeha Amari. Instead, come to me and tell me where it is.”

“I will,” Famine said.

Mercy nodded. If this thing that was once Reyes went wandering this wasteland, she might be able to find a more hidden place within the Command Center for her most precious belongings. A place to hide from him, if need be. What her future with this creature held, Mercy didn’t know, but she felt anything but safe from it. She hadn’t yet laid eyes on Fareeha’s body. What if she was wrong? What if Fareeha wasn’t waiting for her in Civilian Quarters? What if Fareeha lay in a field of dead  Omnics out there somewhere, forgotten until this golem of slime and bone happened upon her at Mercy’s behest? She shook the thought away.

“You sure you’re not hungry?” Famine asked her.

The meat on the skewer was inedibly charred.

“I’m starving,” Mercy said.


	18. Demons

A woman in a hijab cradled her son as she ran down the hall. She’d heard the blast from the infirmary, though she couldn't identify plasma. She ran towards Civilian Quarters, hearing metal footfalls down every hallway she passed. 

She had lived with her son at the Oasis Facility for the past month. Each day, she had lead him to the cafeteria, and then to the makeshift elementary school. Each day, she relayed assurances from the soldiers to her son that they would return home soon. 

The door came into view. A single guard, maybe ten years older than her own boy. He jumped at the sight of her and lowered the muzzle of his rifle. He waved her over. She made it three steps closer to the door. A metal hand slammed down on her shoulder and gripped. She was turned, and the Omnic grasped at the child in her arms. 

“Let go of her!” The guard shouted, awkwardly strafing, looking for a shot, “Let go!” 

Molten metal hit the wall and the machine fell headless; mechanical joints twitching. The woman dashed for the door, and the guard pulled it open for her to run through. Mercy walked up to the dead machine and put another plasma shot through its chassis. The twitching stopped. She turned to look at the guard. Her plasma burns were nothing but soot on bare skin, but the hair on that side was singed badly. She was smeared with blood; hers and others. The top half of her scrubs were barely holding together. She was looking straight through him. 

* * *

Sunlight fell on the dead world once more. Before the Paris Command Center, it fell on the ashes of a campfire, a makeshift set of weigh scales, and two figures making their way towards the monolithic main doors. One a woman, striding confidently across the broken stonework, keeping an eye on her footing. The other shambled and stumbled along the stones, its clumsily arranged toes doing little to steady it. The two came to the crack in doorway, like the forced open entrance of an ancient tomb, and the woman turned back to face the wraith. 

“These ruins are important to me,” Mercy said, “For the time being, treat them as my home.” 

“Rrugh. Shelter,” Famine grunted, “Pointless to us.” 

“To you, perhaps,” Mercy said, “May I ask that you don’t enter this place without my permission?” 

“Mm.” 

Mercy leaned against the inside of the giant door. She looked out at the crumbling skyline. Famine squirmed and twisted, looking through the crack but not crossing the threshold. 

“I...” Mercy began. 

Famine looked at her, its muddled face not offering any readable emotion. It seemed to be waiting. Eventually, it returned to sniffing about at some nearby skeletons. It was these moments in the early mornings that Mercy most missed the birds. There was nothing to greet the new day but the silence of the dead. Famine rooted through a collapsed fox-hole and found two skeletons wrapped about one another. It crawled out with new bones added to its collection. Its jawbone was intact again. It looked out at the rising sun, and its surface wriggled. 

“Something I used-” It grunted, “Rhuggh.” 

The wriggling abruptly stopped. The wraith turned to face Mercy, then looked out to the sun again. With awkward, inexperienced movements, Famine got onto his knees. He placed his hands together before his face, then bowed his head. Mercy could hear the gurgle of slime in its throat and occasionally saw a spray of the stuff onto the ground before it. The drops of ichor clung together and accumulated, then dragged themselves towards the prostrate wraith, rejoining with him as still he whispered, and still he spewed that black tar. 

_It’s him and I, Fareeha,_ Mercy thought, _it could be just him and I._

Famine finished its ritual, and attempted to stand. It stumbled forward on its twisted limbs, mangled by the strange position, and almost dashed itself upon the wall of dead Omnics. Then, it stood upright, and looked back to Mercy. 

“I shall travel into the city, then? I will return.” 

“Wait here at the door,” Mercy said, “I’ll be here at noon, every day... most days.” 

“I understand,” The wraith said, “’For I know the thoughts I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.’ Until we meet again, Mercy.” 

The thing turned and made its way up the metal cliff behind it. As if free of the thought that it should retain human shape, it became like a slithering animal; bones jutted out of joints on uneven limbs. It was up the side in a moment. Then, it reached the top and was hobbling away. 

Mercy backed into the shadows of her newly claimed fortress. Shrouded in dark, her body shivering, she watched the edge of the embankment. Famine didn’t return. She stumbled further into the hall and collapsed. 

He would be back. He had been here. He had known the layout well enough to catch her. She couldn’t trust a word he... it... had said. It might have been her who stumbled into his home, for all she knew. Or he’d been following her. Christ, how long might he have been following her? Since before she got to Paris? 

She sat against the wall. Getting all the artifacts down that elevator shaft. That was the priority. 

“He grabbed me out of that elevator shaft,” Mercy groaned, “That won’t work.” 

Find somewhere to hide her most precious items. Find somewhere in the city where she could hide herself. Find a few places to hide herself, actually. And Fareeha’s body... 

Civilian Quarters. That was where she was going next. That was where it had happened. Here, and in Oasis. The last bit of pain her mind held in store for her. The one thing that still hurt too much. 

She walked. She was treating bodies as landmarks now, like a mountain climber, or a Great War soldier. She wondered if she would ever look at these piles of decaying calcium and simply not see the pointless loss. She’d reached Civilian Quarters in Oasis. She remembered that part now. 

Fareeha and her looking across the bunk room at each other. Fareeha was laying back, head against the pillow, headphones on over damp, unbrushed, freshly showered hair. She smiled at Mercy. 

Mercy leaned in the doorframe, looking into the Barracks. Had Reyes been here? Was there anywhere safe from him? He was an amalgam of corpses in a world of billions of dead. What dark monuments to him might be waiting out there? This room wasn’t safe anymore. Mercy walked in. She crouched down and looked at the display shelf. The images were undisturbed. 

“I need to... press them, I guess,” Mercy said, “I have to make glass somehow.” 

She saw that her pile of polyester scraps was undefiled, too. Some of the pieces she’d been finding could be called, in earnest, pieces of cloth that remained intact. She’d stitched several pairs of her simple loincloth, in varying quality. She pulled a new one on, mumbling under her breath; about what, she wasn’t sure. She looked up at the cot. She imagined Fareeha there, looking at her with that wild hair and coy look. 

“I... I don’t know,” Mercy said, “What being alone in this world with him means.” 

Fareeha swung her legs to the side of the cot. She sat up and pulled her headphones down around her neck. She looked up at Mercy; empathy and expectation. 

“I know,” Mercy said, “I know I have to.” 

She walked out the door. 

She walked past the guard; the kid was crossing himself with one hand. She half-stumbled through the door and into a room of almost a hundred people. She stared out at the people before her. There was the woman she’d helped get here, subtly pointing to Mercy and whispering to the woman beside her. Her son was in her lap. A nurse walked up to Mercy, taking in her appearance. 

“It’s over,” Mercy said, “The one chance we had.” 

“Mercy, are you... alright?” They asked, “I’m going to give you a quick cognition test-” 

“I’m fine,” She said, “Get your hands off me, I’m fine.” 

The nurse took a step back. 

“We’re... distributing sedatives,” They said, “It’s just a sedative. Parents can give it to their kids before taking their own, because it’s just a sedative.” 

The door to Civilian Quarters. The skeleton of Ana Amari. She’d been shifted to one side, but she kept her vigil. Mercy sat down next to the skeleton once again. There was a smear of black slime on the wall, where Mercy had sat before. She took a spot on the other side. 

“How could you,” She asked, “How could do that to her?” 

The skeleton offered no apology. 

“You out here?” Mercy said, trembling, “With her in there? That doesn’t- no.” 

Mercy stood. She held out her hands, trying to decide if there was a respectable way to move Ana. She delicately shifted the figure to one side until she could get the door open. She went in. 

“Because it’s just a sedative.” 

“Is it?” 

“Yes!” The nurse nodded, with sudden energy, “We can’t lie to them; that can’t be the last thing we do. No, we... we have syrettes. Morphine. Two each. That’s our job.” 

The door opened. Mercy turned and levelled the plasma pistol. There were shouts of fright from a few corners of the room. The guard stumbled back, hands off his rifle. 

“More of them,” The guard said, “It might be... it might be just us.” 

Mercy lowered the pistol. She turned it over in her hands. 

“Give us time.” She told him. 

Mercy walked out the door. The skeleton of Amari had slumped, as if staring downwards. Mercy started down the hallway of dead machines, and made it three steps. 

She ran her fingers through that messy hair. With one arm about the waist, Fareeha pulled her down. She slipped the headphones onto Mercy’s head. Fareeha loved watching her hair when she was headbanging. That was another new memory. 

The hallway was behind her. Where was she going? 

She pictured Pharah soaring through the sky. There had to be something else; some battle to escape to. 

She was sitting outside Civilian Quarters. The kid had killed three of them. Looked like he’d bled out. You can still stand guard while you bleed out. He’d given them time. The nurse had taken their own when they were done with their half. They’d insisted they do half. She had two syrettes in one hand and a plasma pistol in the other. Maybe ten more dead Omnics in front of her. His radio was crackling. 

“Those fucking things are all over the Orca, we’re trying to shake them.” 

“Fareeha,” Mercy whispered, there’s more coming, and I’m not sure how much charge is left.” 

_More fusion cells in the dead ones, Fareeha whispered, wire them in with the core._

I think I’m done,” She said, “I’m so tired, but my body... it’s like I just got up this morning. I think I might be in trouble.” 

The syrettes hit the floor. She turned the plasma pistol over in her hands, slid her finger through a crude safety feature, and ripped the wire out of the circuit. A single set of metal footfalls ahead. Mercy began charging the shot. It was another of those things; the gargoyles. One would be spotted every few days. Rumours abounded among the soldiers that they occasionally whispered Fareeha’s callsign. It crept around the corner and saw her. Its eyes darted to the pistol, but it didn’t lunge. It crawled forward on all fours, wings bent back, knocking askew the flourescent light fixtures above. Sparks showered around it. Mercy lowered the plasma pistol. It wouldn’t fire anymore, and the charge sequence wouldn’t stop. 

The gargoyle stopped directly in front of her. 

“You won’t find her here,” Mercy said. 

“You are alone.” 

“She’s in Paris. Fighting.” 

“She has killed a great many of us. We are improving.” 

“She’ll get you all eventually.” 

The gargoyle reared up, positioning one wing. Its head flicked to the side; it had noticed the vibration of the fusion core on the plasma pistol. Mercy closed her eyes. 

“If it’s all the same to you, I could use some rest.” 

Mercy looked up at the crooked, broken doors. The stuck elevator car. The smears of footprints about. Blood on the floor nearby. She wasn’t crying anymore. She didn’t know what she felt. There was something in the dust there. A small piece of power armour. It was too faded to tell the colour. She stuck her head into the elevator shaft, looking about for a service ladder. 


End file.
